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I AM GRATEFUL to many colleagues, friends, and students for
their help in writing and trying out this Guide. Michel Grimaud and
Paul Kugler were kind enough to write special sections on Jungian
criticism and cognitive poetics respectively William McPheron art-
fully crafted the original version of the chapter on research aids.
Ellie Ragland-Sullivan gave me invaluable assistance and reas-
surance with the Lacan sections, as did Caryl Flinn with my remarks
on film criticism. Bernard Paris shared his knowledge of "third
force" materials and has ably directed the Florida Institute while we
were trying out this Guide. Terry Brown and Barrie Ruth Straus
both gave me expert help with the more intricate parts of feminist
psychoanalytic criticism. Claire Kahane has directed the Buffalo
Center while I was working on this Guide, and she too has counseled
me on feminist criticism David Willbern has directed the Buffalo
Center, and served as symposiarch, bibliographer, and punster at
various occasions where I tried out these ideas. Sam Kimball,
Brenda Marshall, and Craig Saper helped as research assistants,
finding materials for one who is always losing them and proofreading
for one impatient of detail Laura Keyes supplied more proofread
ing and her whimsical sense of error and ego Murray Schwartz has
graciously shared, over many years, his encyclopedic knowledge of
the psychoanalytic literature Norman Kiell gave me immensely
helpful counsel on the project as a whole. Without their contribu-
tions this Guide would be much less useful than I hope it is

vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Stuart Krichevsky of Sterling Lord Literistic took care of the
negotiating, and William Sisler proved an editor of taste and vision
I am grateful, finally, to Dragonfly Software for their Nowa Bene,
which enabled me to produce "camera-ready copy" and to have a
momentary sense of what Caxton and William Moms must have
felt.
Many other colleagues and students, too many to name here,
have made suggestions and have contributed much. I am mindful
and appreciative of them all I do, however, want to memorialize
once again my respectful indebtedness to my mentors in psycho-
analysis who led me past the magnolia tree at the Boston Psycho-
analytic Institute: most memorably, Ives Hendrick, Peter Knapp,
Joseph Michaels, Paul Myerson, Harry Rand, and especially
Elizabeth Zetzel. Prior to them all, of course, was G. Henry Katz m
Philadelphia. And Jane.
I must apologize for the many references to my own prior
work. Indeed if you look at the final list of references you will find
more entries for me than for Freud. I do not mean to imply that I
am more important. It's simply that I have often expressed in writ-
ing the ideas that inform this Guide. It seemed only sensible m this,
as in other matters, to guide you to the primary source.

I HAVE DESIGNED this Guide to provide you, my reader, with a
program of reading in what we in the game call, "lit-and-psych" or,
slightly more formally, literature-and-psychology. That is shorthand
for using psychology, particularly psychoanalytic psychology, to an-
swer questions about literature and the arts. Why do people write
and read literature? What do they get out of it? Why does this
writer write in this particular style? Why does that character act that
way?
I imagine you as someone who simply would like to be able to
answer questions like these. Or you would like to talk and think
intelligently about the various topics listed in the upcoming outline.
Or you may be someone who would like to be able to use psycho-
analytic concepts in other, nonpsychological work: literature, history,
philosophy, or "theory." You may, then, be looking for a kind of
"general education" in psychoanalysis.
Alternatively, you might be someone working more formally in
one of the university programs specifically in literature-and-

HOLLAND'S GUIDE

psychology or more generally "theory" or even, now, "psychoanalytic
studies." I have worked with such programs at the Institute for Psy-
chological Study of the Arts at the University of Florida and the
Center for Psychological Study of the Arts at the State University of
New York at Buffalo. Both these programs pose examinations in
psychoanalytic psychology. The exams simply ask the student to be
literate in psychoanalysis. The most prosaic use for this Guide, then,
would be to study for such examinations. Chapters 2 and 3, the
Topical Outlines, list topics. An examinee might be asked to define,
describe, explain, or criticize these topics, drawing on recent as well
as early psychoanalytic thinking where they differ. More generally,
the ability to handle these topics competently provides a useful basis
for dissertations, papers for presentation or publication, but also for
larger speculations and the reading of psychoanalytic comments on
literature, society, or human nature. You could also use this Guide
as a self-test: Do I understand this topic? Have I read these
authors?
At the same time, I have to admit up front that this effort is
futile. Psychoanalysis is the science of human subjectivity. It offers
insights into the mind's ways of thinking, dreaming, imagining, want-
ing, and especially the mind's ways of hiding from itself. Ultimately,
each of us has to find those ways out in our own minds since we do
not have access to the minds of others. In other words, the
laboratory for this science is one's own mind. Without some, so to
speak, hands-on experience of psychoanalytic insight into the mind's
ways, psychoanalysis becomes dry and abstract. It will seem
arbitrary and made-up.
A "reading knowledge" of psychoanalysis, then, is not enough.
One needs some experience of unconscious processes. You can get
it by undergoing dynamic psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, or even just
some of the new modes of teaching that try to give students insight

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into their own processes. However you get it, you must get it if you
are to do serious work in lit-and-psych.
Reading is not enough, yet reading is also necessary alongside
that actual experience. To help you with the reading part of your
quest is my purpose in this Guide. It is a highly structured and
focused Guide. I believe that simply handing you a bibliography-a
list of readings-would not really help in this project because the list
would have to be so large. The texts would have to come from all
the many stages and perspectives in psychoanalytic thought. A bad
effect of the book list approach is to rob psychoanalytic writings of
their clinical, social, or historical setting. Treating psychoanalysis
just as texts makes it a merely philosophical or literary idea, often
just the latest or most fashionable version of psychoanalysis.
Real psychoanalysis stands or falls on a cumulated base of clini-
cal experience. If we ignore that base, we turn psychoanalysis into
language games or airy speculation. It is essential to have some
clinical experience of psychoanalysis and to supplement that experi-
ence with a sense of the historical practice of psychoanalysis. More-
over, in my experience, the more you study psychoanalysis per se,
especially clinical psychoanalysis, the better psychoanalytic criticism
you will write. It is a mistake to read only psychoanalytic literary
criticism and then try to practice it.
For these reasons, I think someone setting out to "read lit-and-
psych" needs more than just a list of readings. Hence, although this
Guide ends with that, a list of readings, the body of the Guide
provides an intellectual road map. The list rests upon an idea of the
clinical, historical, and intellectual development of psychoanalysis.
For the same reasons, you should not expect this list to include
all the important books in psychoanalysis. You should not expect to
find here everything interesting or worthwhile in lit-and-psych or
psychoanalytic psychology. Nor is this a bibliography of everything

HOLLAND'S GUIDE

psychoanalytic in today's literary, filmic, "cultural," and philosophi-
cal studies. You should not expect it to include all the books based
on a nodding acquaintance with psychoanalysis that have appeared
in recent years as literary critics and philosophers have faddishly
taken up psychoanalysis.
This is a tendentious list, one with a purpose. This is a list
designed to give you whatever knowledge reading can of how to
apply clinical psychoanalysisis to literature and the other arts. It is
moreover a list with a lot of opinions behind it. I make no claim that
this is an "objective" survey of psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic
criticism in the usual sense of the word. I believe the essence of psy-
choanalysis's discoveries is that the self, consciously and uncon-
sciously, styles everything-everything--we do from making love to
doing science. Hence there is no such thing as an "objective" (or, in
the philosophers' phrase, "God's eye") view of anything.
Let me put that the other way round. When we try to be
"objective," the best we can do is play by certain rules designed to
minimize personal vagary. Thus we have rules by which we do his-
tory or science or bibliographies or literary criticism or psychology
or psychoanalysis. But each of us necessarily follows and enacts and
understands those rules within a certain personal style. Today's cog-
nitive science teaches us that we perceive even tables and chairs
within a personal style, to say nothing of something as controversial
as psychoanalysis. Hence this book is not an "objective" guide to
literature-and-psychology or psychoanalytic psychology. If you
would like to know my partialities now, I describe them in Chapter 5
(pp. 59-75).
Nevertheless, despite my belief that it is impossible, I will do
my best to "tell you the truth." That is, I will try to tell you as
honestly and fully as I can my thoughts about literature-and-

A GUIDE TO THE GUIDE

psychology (as in the following brief historical sketch of psycho-
analysis).
Psychoanalysis came into being-entered its first phase-near
the end of the nineteenth century, when Freud began his ambitious
effort to found a psychology that would be a branch of science rather
than philosophy. At the same time, academic psychology was also
changing from a branch of philosophy to an experimental science.
(William James was probably the last person to be simultaneously a
psychologist and a philosopher.) At that time, however, and to a
large extent even today, these two branches of psychology have not
had much to say to each other, although I believe they will in the
near future. The question, Is psychoanalysis scientific?, remains a
lively issue for all involved.
After this scientific origin, I think of psychoanalysis as having
evolved in three chronological phases: a psychology of the uncon-
scious (1897-1923), ego psychology (1923-), and a psychology of the
self (c. 1950- ) The later phases do not replace the earlier ones.
Rather, each phase builds on and includes what preceded it, enlarg-
ing the field of human behavior psychoanalysis attempts to explain.
One can define these three phases by the polarity psycho-
analytic thinkers used to explain events. First, it was conscious as
opposed to unconscious. Then, ego vis-A-vis nonego. Today, it is
self and not-self. More whimsically, you could contrast these three
phases by the parts of speech they would make the word unconscious
into. In the first phase, it was an adjective but also a noun, referring
to a thing, a system, or even a place-a sort of bin-in the brain. In
the second phase, when Freud announced that "unconscious" was
only descriptive, the word became an adjective and only an adjective,
as in "unconscious ego." Now, one major theorist (Schafer) has
ingeniously suggested that the word has become an adverb-we

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should think in terms of a whole person doing this or that uncon-
sciously.
First-phase, "classical" psychoanalysis explained events as con-
scious or unconscious or as passing from one state to the other.
Within this large framework, Freud developed certain key ideas
about the working and structure of the mind. The other big insight
of the first phase was an understanding of child development as
having specific stages, residues of which persist into adult life. Dur-
ing this first phase, psychoanalysis primarily addressed pathological
or unusual behavior: neurosis, dreams, symptoms, jokes, or artistic
creativity.
The first stage grew directly from Freud's most basic discovery.
I think it is so fundamental to understanding psychoanalysis that I
shall highlight it:

If a patient free associates in connection with a symptom, that
is, says whatever comes to mind without holding anything back
sooner or later that patient will enunciate (over strongly felt
resistance) a repressed thought or feeling that the symptom
expresses.

Similarly, if a patient free associates to a dream, the patient will
become aware (against resistance) of a previously unconscious wish.
Freud found the same thing with jokes and with lapses of memory,
forgetting, and slips of the tongue or pen or limbs (called para-
praxes). Further, free association would work not only for neurotic
patients, but for the parapraxes and jokes and dreams of ordinary
people also (as Freud found in his lifelong self-analysis).
In all these odd, marginal behaviors, free association reveals a
resisted latent or unconscious content underneath a tolerated
manifest or conscious behavior. As Freud realized this manifest-

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latent pattern occurred in so many different spheres of mental
activity, he concluded that he was doing more than explaining some
oddments of human behavior. He had arrived at something funda-
mental to human nature itself, a general principle of psychological
explanation, the struggle between "the" conscious and "the" uncon-
SCIous.
Gradually, it became clear that this polarity applied not only to
odd or marginal behaviors, but to every aspect of daily life from the
most abstruse intellectual thought to the most primitive urges of
rage or lust. It applied to every kind of person from the wisest to the
maddest. In this "classical" phase, Freud thought of conscious and
unconscious as opposed forces, as systems or even places. He and
his first followers explained overt behaviors and mental events as
expressions or repressions of unconscious material occurring when
psychic energy shifted from one state to the other.
In the other major discovery of the first phase, psychoanalysts
came to understand child development as having specific stages lead-
ing to a style or character in adult life. In particular, character
developed from the child's resolution of its oedipus complex
(between, say, ages three and five). At that time, the child is finding
and making its place in a world divided into genders, male and
female, and generations, parent and child. First-phase psycho-
analysts discovered that your style of adult relatedness to other
people grew out of the way you coped with your love and hate
toward mother and father as you made your way into that gendered
and generationed world. Even earlier, the child developed
"character," a style of being, from the way it learned to adapt inter-
nally to adult concerns about the management of the child's body in
feeding, seeing, defecating, urinating, masturbating, or walking. Sec-
ond and third stage psychoanalysts found that these earlier oral,

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anal, and phallic stages, because they were earlier, played an even
more decisive role in character than the oedipal.
Within this first-phase framework, Freud developed ideas of
great generality about the working and structure of the mind. These
explanations in terms of a childhood or a repressed unconscious
struggling against an adult conscious mind are powerful. Good work
was done and good work is still being done using them.
Freud himself, however, found after a quarter-century that
clinical experience required him to revise his first theories. In this
second phase of his thought, Freud complicated the simple division
of the mind into conscious and unconscious by mapping it onto the
"structural" hypothesis. In this second phase the mind's workings
consisted not of a simple polarity, but of the interaction of id, super-
ego, reality, and repetition compulsion under the governance of a
presiding ego. Id, one would define today as the psychic representa-
tion of biological drives. The superego, we can think of as the
incorporated commands of one's parents, both to do and not to do,
violation of which leads to guilt or depression. The repetition com-
pulsion means the human tendency to try old solutions even on new
problems. The ego is the synthesizer and executive that chooses
strategies and tactics that best balance these competing needs. Con-
scious and unconscious became adjectives applied to the new struc-
tures. To most theorists, the id was all unconscious, but there was
conscious ego and unconscious, conscious superego and uncon-
scious.
Freud and his colleagues of the 1930s expanded their account
of defense mechanisms from repression alone, making the conscious
unconscious. The defenses now included many strategies, such as
reversing anger into kindness, projecting one's own impulses onto
others, or isolating one thought or feeling from another. Freud him-
self revised the theory of the instincts to include aggressive as well as

A GUIDE TO THE GUIDE

sexual drives. Heinz Hartmann posited autonomous ego functions
that linked psychoanalysis to such topics in orthodox psychology as
perception, learning, memory, or motility. This second phase psy-
choanalysis is usually called ego psychology. It spread all over the
world as the early psychoanalysts of Germany and Austria and
Hungary fled the Third Reich.
The third phase took place largely after Freud's deathin 1939.
Psychoanalytic psychology went beyond the ego to address the self in
the largest sense and, finally, all of human behavior. In the first
phase, the basic explanation was "the" unconscious as against "the"
conscious. In the second, it was ego versus non-ego. In the third, it
became self and non-self. As early as 1930, in the first chapter of
Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud began this third phase:
"Originally the ego includes everything; later it separates off an
external world from itself." He had recognized that at least during
the beginning of an individual's life span, the wholly intrapsychic
model he had used in the first two phases had to give way to an
interpsychic model, one that included both the individual mind and
its surround.
It remained for others to develop this third phase, however. As
Freud and his circle in Vienna were making these large changes in
psychoanalytic theory, Nazi persecutions forced their emigration and
spread second- and third-phase psychoanalysis all over the world,
except in the German-occupied countries. In the process, psycho-
analysis acquired different styles in different nations. Indeed, some
of these styles are inconsistent with one another, so that psycho-
analysis often seems today no longer a unified discipline. It now
reflects the diversity of the various intellectual cultures that have
made psychoanalysis their own.
In the United States, from the 1950s through the 1970s, Erik
Erikson and his followers directed psychoanalysis toward the mutual

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interaction of personal identity with cultural, political, and
anthropological factors in the environment. Increasingly, psycho-
analysts began to consider the interaction ("mutuality") between a
society that sustained and shaped the individual and an individual
who shaped and sustained-and sometimes led-the society. Erik-
son's theories had great influence on biographical, historical, reli-
gious, and political writing, but less on literature and philosophy. It
was another theory of identity, Heinz Lichtenstein's, that (at least in
my view) bore fruit in literary studies.
In England, a cadre of outstanding psychoanalysts (among
them, Melanie Klein, Ronald Fairbairn, and D. W. Winnicott) in the
1940s and 1950s challenged or changed Freud's biological "instinct
theory." These "object relations" theorists substituted an account of
child development based on interpersonal encounters between the
child and its significant others. Freud had posited as the roots of
human motivation innate sexual and aggressive drives and an even
deeper, but also biological, "Nirvana principle" (a drive toward mini-
mal excitation). By contrast, the British "middle school" theorized
an instinctual need to relate to other people. It was in those rela-
tionships, rather than from bodily drives, that the child learned dif-
ferent styles of loving and hating. Concentration on these pre-
oedipal experiences led to a more comprehensive account of the
themes in the child's development that persisted in the adult's style.
The oedipus complex is only one among several critical events.
Indeed the child's first-year relation to the mother quite over-
shadows what Freud had thought dominant, the relation to the
father in the third year and after. Hence the British school is some-
times at odds with conservative analysts, particularly in America.
In France, Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) and those who followed
him (starting about 1965) turned toward understanding conscious
and unconscious experiences as an entry into a linguistic culture.

A GUIDE TO THE GUIDE

Lacan deliberately chose an arcane, metaphorical way to write, des-
cribing concerns of the third phase of psychoanalysis (object rela-
tions or personal style) in the language of the first phase (phallus,
castration). This obscurity has necessitated a great many explica-
tions of his thought. Nevertheless, because of his emphasis on lan-
guage, many literary critics of a philosophical turn have adopted
Lacan with enthusiasm, applying his principles to cultural as well as
literary theory. Because Lacan treated conscious and unconscious as
at odds, the self, as Lacan portrayed it, is split, divided, or alienated.
Hence his ideas conflict with concepts like the "identity" of Erikson
or Lichtenstein and even the ego as described in second-phase psy-
choanalysis.
More recently, in the United States, Heinz Kohut has
developed a "self-psychology" based on the development of the indi-
vidual's capacity for realistic self-love alongside the traditional psy-
choanalytic account of child development through drives or libidinal
stages Both in Kohut's and Otto Kernberg's alternative version,
these new theories of the "borderline personality" have become
highly influential among American therapists. At the same time,
however, they tend to conflict with the traditional account of child
development and therapy embodied in second-phase psychoanalysis.
There have been vigorous debates in the American psychoanalytic
scene.
Margaret Mead cannily pointed out that Freud's theories about
women were those of a six-year-old boy. In reaction to this, the
weakest part of first- and second-phase psychoanalysis, the 1970s
and 1980s have seen emerge a lively feminist critique and revision of
psychoanalysis. It cuts across national boundaries although it derives
particularly from Lacan and British object-relations theory.
The most recent development in psychoanalysis has taken place
primarily in the United States, United Kingdom, West Germany,

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and Israel. Some psychoanalytic thinkers are trying to connect the
psychoanalytic model of the human being with "cognitive science,"
that is, with cognitive psychology (the principles developed from
experiments in perception, cognition, and memory); with the simula-
tion of intelligence on computers; and with neuroscientific research
into the functioning of the brain. This merger represents a return to
the scientific origins of psychoanalysis, as against the recent claim
that psychoanalysis is merely a system for interpreting language. It
also seems to me an immensely promising avenue.
Like other sciences, psychoanalysis has its internal conflicts.
Sometimes these are matters of fashion. Sometimes they reach to
fundamental questions. Like other sciences, psychoanalysis has
evolved through stages and continues to evolve. The most recent
thinking in psychoanalysis incorporates and generalizes some of
Freud's first work in the same way that Einstein's relativity theory
incorporates and generalizes Newton's laws of motion. Neverthe-
less, one cannot learn psychoanalysis as one might learn physics or
biology, by studying the "state of the art," that is, the way the science
is today. Perhaps what we mean by a "mature" science is just that,
one that can be studied historically. In any case, I do not think it is
a good idea in the 1980s to study psychoanalysis by reading only the
contemporary versions, and certainly not just one of them. Both the
theory and the data of psychoanalysis are embedded in a human con-
text.
To be sure, Freud thought of himself, and subsequent psycho-
analysts think of themselves, as working within a cumulative science
In this model, psychoanalytic principles cumulate as they are con-
firmed by clinical experience or, more rarely, by experiment.
Nevertheless clinical data are notoriously subject to the theoretical
and other preconceptions of the clinician. Even experimental results
reflect the biases of the experimenter. We do well to keep in mind

A GUIDE TO THE GUIDE

what those biases or preconceptions are for any given piece of psy-
choanalytic writing. They are necessarily rooted in the history of
psychoanalysis, especially its conflicts.
Because psychoanalysis has traditionally regarded itself as a
science, one should read psychoanalytic literature keeping that claim
in mind. One should also be mindful of the view widely held today
that psychoanalysis is not a science, but ahenneneutic, a system for
interpreting texts-language. In addition to its scientific and
hermeneutic claims, psychoanalysis shares certain metapsychological
points of view. By metapsychology, Freud meant the types of state-
ment required in a full psychoanalytic account of an event. One
should read any psychoanalytic paper with those five points of view
in mind. (They appear in the Topical Outline below.)
The Topical Outline (Chapter 2) provides a list and organiza-
tion of the above themes in Chapter 1. In using this Guide, you will
find it helpful, I think, to read Chapter 2 in the light of this "Guide
to the Guide," and the "Guide" against Chapter 2. Chapter 3, the
Topical Outline Keyed, then adds to that first list citations for the
appropriate books and articles in the list of references that is Chap-
ter 7. Whenever possible, I have listed readings in the Topical Out-
line Keyed so as to lead one deeper and deeper into a given topic.
First on the list will be summarizing statements, introductions, or
guides to the idea. Later items will give more complex, detailed, or
primary accounts. You should be able to read, therefore, any topic
in the Outline at whatever level of complexity seems right to you.
You should, however, be aware that, given the literary aims of this
Guide, I have completely omitted one major topic: therapy and ther-
apeutic techniques. Also, although they are fascinating, I have not
tried to survey the growing number of biographical studies of such
major psychoanalytic figures as Freud, Jung, Ernest Jones, Melanie
Klein, Karen Homey, and others.

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Chapter 4 applies the intellectual map to literature-and-
psychoanalysis (or, more precisely, literature-and-psychology and not
just literature but occasionally other arts as well). Here again, the
readings listed in the outline refer to items in the references in the
last chapter of this Guide. As you encounter items in that list of
readings, keep in mind what led you to them them in Chapters 2, 3,
4, and 5. The prose describing them and their position in the various
outlines constitute annotations of what would otherwise be an
alphabetized reading list devoid of signposts. Again, as with Chap-
ters 1 and 2, look back and forth from chapter to chapter.
I have resisted the temptation to include any and all good
things to read in psychoanalysis in Chapter 7. My aim in this Guide
is to provide a relatively small, focused, manageable reading list.
There are enough long psychoanalytic booklists already. If you want
more, Chapter 6, Research Aids, gives an account of the various bib-
liographies, dictionaries, concordances, and indexes that one could
use to expand the bibliography of Chapter 7 or to research a given
psychoanalytic topic or author in depth.
Chapter 5 is an epilogue in which I express my opinions more
explicitly than in the rest of this idiosyncratic Guide. It also lists
some light reading and poses a heavy question, Where are psycho-
analysis and literature-and-psychology going from here? At the
moment, at least, to Chapter 2.

A Topical Outline

THE OUTLINE THAT follows is designed to give you an organiz-
ing set of files, so to speak, within which to put your reading and
knowledge of psychoanalysis: three phases and various issues and
schools within those phases. Incidentally, notice that I have begun
numbering the outline with 0. Please forgive this eccentricity. I took
my cue from computer numbering (0, 1, 2), so as to avoid the confu-
sion of "2. First phase... 3. Second phase... ".
As you read this outline, keep in mind the basic objective of the
Guide. It is to organize readings so that you can think and talk intel-
ligently about the various topics listed. This chapter gives the topics.
I have used an outline form that I hope will enable you to carry them
in your head as you read further. Chapter 3 gives the same topics
keyed to readings. Chapter 4 gives the same topics as they relate to
literature-and-psychology.

HOLLAND'S GUIDE

A Topical Outline

0. Overview of psychoanalysis since its origins.

a. 3 historical phases of psychoanalysis:

1890-1923 Cs and Ucs; id-psychology
1923- Ego and non-ego; ego-psychology
ca. 1950- Self and non-self; psychology of self and
other

Piaget
infant psychology and development
brain architecture and chemistry
synthesis

The Topical Outline Keyed

THIS CHAPTER for the Guide consists of the same topical outline
as Chapter 2 (including my starting with 0). Now, however, it is
keyed to readings. That is, the Topical Outline (Chapter 2) provides
a list and organization of important topics in psychoanalytic psychol-
ogy. The Topical Outline Keyed adds to that first list references to
the appropriate books and articles in the References that make up
Chapter 7. Whenever possible, I have listed readings in the follow-
ing way: the first items under a given topic are likely to be simple,
summarizing statements, secondary (or even tertiary) rather than
primary Later items are more complex and detailed accounts, and
the last are the primary sources for the idea. You should, therefore,
be able to explore any topic in the Outline at whatever level of com-
plexity you feel you need. Some items you may feel you can skip
entirely. You may want to probe others in depth. Look back and
forth from the References to this chapter because the place of an
item in this Outline constitutes an annotation on it.

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In this chapter, I have listed most references simply by author
and date (enough to elicit full bibliographic data in the bibliography
in Chapter 7). I have abbreviated Freud simply as SF and all
references to Freud are keyed to the Standard Edition (see the first
Freud entry in Chapter 7). That is, a date with a letter added, like
1901b, refers to 1901b in the Standard Edition's Freud bibliography
and such other aids as the Freud abstracts, concordance, or
German-English paginator. For other authors 1901b would refer to
the second 1901 item in the bibliography of Chapter 7. Occasionally,
both with Freud and with other authors, I have included short titles
or page or chapter references where I believed they would enable
you to read the outline more meaningfully.

BY LITERATURE-AND-PSYCHOLOGY, I mean the applica-
tion of psychology to explore literary problems and behavior.
(Occasionally, however, I will refer in this summary to other arts:
film, music, or painting.) People sometimes speak of "psychological
criticism," which is literary criticism using a formal psychology to
analyze the writing or reading or content of literary texts. Either
way, however, what defines the field is the explicit use of a formal
psychology, and the psychology that literary critics most commonly
use is psychoanalytic psychology.
In the largest sense, all criticism is psychological criticism, since
all criticism and theory proceed from assumptions about the psychol-
ogy of the humans who make or experience or are portrayed in liter-
ature. When Plato speaks of poetry enfeebling the mind or of poetic
creation as a divine madness, when Aristotle writes of catharsis or
Coleridge of imagination, they are making psychological statements.
Literature also embodies the psychological assumptions of its
makers, and literature is realized through the psychological assump-

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tions of its interpreters. Hence, historical critics will turn to the psy-
chological beliefs of the Renaissance to explicate the plays of Shake-
speare or the criticism of Jonson. Twentieth-century critics also use
psychological assumptions, even critics who posit an "objective"
text-they posit a perception of that text independent of the activities
of the perceiver's mind. Some twentieth-century critics leave their
psychological assumptions tacit or derive them from common sense
or philosophy, not psychology as such. Most twentieth-century
critics, however, make their psychological assumptions formal and
explicit.
Hence, psychological criticism, properly so called, dates from
the first efforts at the end of the nineteenth century to create experi-
mental, clinical, or "scientific" psychologies separate from aesthetic
or philosophical statements about the nature of the human. From
that time to the present, psychological criticism has drawn primarily
on three psychologies: psychoanalytic (Freudian), archetypal (or
analytic or Jungian), and cognitive psychology.
Psychologies, however, deal in the first instance not with poems
or stories, but persons. Hence, psychological criticism will discuss
the author, some members) of the author's audience, a character,
or "the language" (and that usually means a character or some psy-
chological process represented in the language). It is useful, there-
fore, when thinking about literture-and-psychology to keep in mind
what person is being discussed. At this point, notice the several divi-
sions of psychoanalytic criticism: three phases of psychoanalysis,
three persons in literature-it is useful in thinking about any given
piece of psychoanalytic criticism to "situate" it in the appropriate
one of the nine categories.
The outline that has served so far necessarily blurs when we
turn from psychoanalysis per se to psychoanalysis applied to litera-
ture or the arts. Despite the change in emphasis I shall keep the

LITERATURE-AND-PSYCHOLOGY 31

headings that I hope have become familiar by now, but I will be
more essayistic here and more inclusive. I will introduce two topics
in literature-and-psychology, close to being but not, strictly,
"psychoanalytic." That is, I will suggest where Jungian literary
criticism touches on Freudian. I will also digress at length on what
seems to me one of the most important places for psychology in the
current critical scene: reader-response criticism.

Despite the expansion of our outline, this remains simply a
guide for someone who wants to begin studying literature-and-
psychology, a road map rather than a geological survey of the area.
There are a number of excellent, longer surveys listed in section 0,
"Overview." As in the other sections of this Guide I have listed texts
(unless otherwise indicated) in order of generality: surveys and sum-
maries first, primary sources last.
I have concentrated on theory and methods rather than practi-
cal criticism of particular texts and authors because I think someone
starting to read in this field does well to become familiar with the
issues involved, the "theory" currently so popular in literary circles.
Where there are no theoretical texts I have occasionally resorted to

LITERATURE-AND-PSYCHOLOGY

practical criticism demonstrating a certain position. On the whole,
though, if you want to look up psychological criticism specifically
directed to Shakespeare or Keats or Dickens, you should turn to the
aids to research in Chapter 6.
By far the largest body of psychological criticism draws on psy-
choanalytic psychology, perhaps because from the very beginning
Freud was concerned with the exact wording of a patient's free asso-
ciations, a slip of the tongue, or the telling of a dream or a joke.
Hence, psychoanalytic psychology lends itself particularly well to the
study of details of poetic language. Also, since the 1960s, psycho-
analysis has become more and more a general psychology, as
theorists have drawn on anthropology, experiments, neuroscience,
and such modern theories as semiotics or information theory. Con-
troversies that looked big in the 1920s, like Freud vs. Jung, now seem
small as psychoanalysis has become a psychology of the self.

Literature-and-Psychology Outline Keyed

0. Overview of psychoanalysis since its origins.

a. 3 historical phases of psychoanalysis:

1890-1923 Cs and Ucs; id-psychology
1923- Ego and non-ego; ego-psychology
ca. 1950- Self and non-self; psychology of self and
other
Here, in chronological order, are a number of general surveys
or commentaries on the application of psychoanalysis or psychology
in general to literature (and, sometimes, the other arts): Hoffman
1957; Grimaud 1976; Holland 1976a, 1978a; Skura 1981; Winner

Literature played a key role in Freud's discovery of psycho-
analysis. In the letter of October 15, 1897, in which he announced
that he had found love of the mother and jealousy of the father in his
self-analysis, he went on to identify this complex with the "gripping
power" of Oedipus Rex and the unconscious forces behind Shake-
speare's writing of Hamlet, as well as that prince's inability to act.
He thus addressed all three of the persons of psychological criticism,
although in this first phase he confined his writings largely to author
or character.
In "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming" (1908e), Freud
developed a powerful model of the literary process. The writer,
stimulated by a present wish, enriches it unconsciously with wishes
from childhood and embodies it in a literary form that entices an
audience (who in their turn take the text as stimulus and elaborate it
with their unconscious wishes). Using this model, he wrote studies of
Leonardo da Vinci and Dostoevsky and his longest literary analysis,
an interpretation of the dreams in Jensen's novella Gradiva. He also
analyzed a variety of literary characters: Hamlet, Macbeth and Lady
Macbeth, Ibsen's Rebecca West, and Falstaff (Holland 1966; Spector
1973; Strachey 1961).

b. Psychoanalysts besides Freud

Freud's writings prompted a number of other early psycho-
analytic figures to literary criticism. Jens Fischer's 1980 anthology

LTERATURE-AND-PSYCHOLOGY

collects many of these first-phase pieces. Typical writings were
Ernest Jones's study of Hamlet ([1910] 1949), Otto Rank's remark-
able analysis of myths (1926), Marie Bonaparte's analysis of Poe
(1933), and Phyllis Greenacre's studies of Swift and Carroll (1955).
Characteristically, these first-phase psychoanalytic critics used only
such early psychoanalytic concepts as "unconscious content," the
oedipus complex, and the phallic and anal stages of child
development. They treated characters mimetically, as real persons
manifesting clinical entities. Typically, such critics also relied heavily
on psychoanalytic jargon and Freud's lists of symbols in the 1914
additions to The Interpretation of Dreams or the first set of Intro-
ductory Lectures in 1915-17 (a tactic that resulted in some bizarre
criticism and a bad reputation for psychoanalytic studies among con-
ventional literary critics).

c. Literary critics

Perhaps because it was so novel, this first-phase style, the
search for a latent content, set the image of psychoanalytic criticism
in literary circles. Also, a number of prominent literary critics of the
1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, began to use this first phase of psycho-
analytic theory: William Empson (1935), Edmund Wilson (1929,
1948), Lionel Trilling (1953), Kenneth Burke (1941, 1966), Leslie
Fiedler (1960), and others represented in the first edition (1957) of
William Phillips's anthology or described in Claudia Morrison's his-
tory of this movement (1968). Psychoanalytic criticism extended into
film with Wolfenstein and Leites' 1950 study of motifs in American,
British, and French movies. In this first phase, psychoanalysis had
great influence on writers as well as critics, as surveyed by Hoffman
(1945, 1957) or, for drama, Sievers (1955).
Criticism in this first phase style continues, sampled in such
anthologies as Crews's (1970) or Kaplan and Kloss's (1973), and

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some of it remains highly effective precisely because of the simplicity
and economy of its theory. Harold Bloom's well-known model of
poetic influence (1973), for example, rests on Freud's early version
of the oedipus complex. Gallop's account of feminism's relation to
psychoanalysis draws on early Freudian models of the family (1982):
psychoanalysis is the father, feminism the daughter. (Contrast Gar-
diner [1976] for whom psychoanalysis is the mother for feminism.)
Some excellent psychoanalytic criticism of film is also written in first-
phase style (Greenberg 1975; Derwin 1985).

d. Archetypal (Jungian) criticism

Because of this emphasis on symbolism and a relatively few
explanatory terms, early psychoanalytic and early archetypal (or
Jungian) criticism often resemble each other. Hence, this is a good
place to quote a brief description of Jungian theory written for this
Guide by Paul Kugler:

Archetypal criticism has been a significant force in
criticism since the 1920s. Its theoretical foundation derives
from the work of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, espe-
cially his idea that archetypal structures are the primary fac-
tors organizing human personality. For Jung, the personal
unconscious consists of memories and images imagess) col-
lected in the course of an individual life. The collective
unconscious, on the other hand, is limited to the imposition of
structural laws-archetypes. The personal unconscious is like
a lexicon where each of us accumulates an individual
vocabulary, but these lexical units acquire value and sig-
nificance only in so far as they are archetypally structured. If
the unconscious activity of the psyche consists in imposing
structures (archetypes) upon content imagess), and if these

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structures are fundamentally the same for all personalities,
then to understand and interpret a literary text psychol-
ogically it is necessary to analyze the unconscious structures
underlying the text itself. This is the model used in traditional
Jungian criticism.
Jung published the first archetypal analysis of a literary
text in 1912 in "Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido," an
extensive analysis of the archetypal structures underlying
Longfellow's Hiawatha. In this analysis, Jung introduced his
interpretative method known as amplification. Earlier, Freud
had demonstrated the importance of free association for
understanding the unconscious motivation and meaning of a
person's dream. Jung extended this idea not only to the per-
sonal associations of the dreamer, but also to intertextual
associations within the dreamer's cultural canon, and in some
cases, cross-cultural associations as well. By establishing a
larger intertextual context for the dream image through
philological, iconological, mythological, and historical
research, the process of amplification dcliteralizes the image,
cultivating an attitude that psychologically questions the naive,
literal level of language and image in order to expose its more
shadowy, metaphorical significance.
Analysis of archetypal structures [Kugler continues) and
the phenomenological amplification of images has character-
ized archetypal criticism from the 1920s to the mid-1960s,
especially in the early work of John Thorburn (1925), Maud
Bodkin ((1934] 1963), and Herbert Read (1967). (For a
sampling see Hopper & Miller 1967.) Jungian theory extends
into the influential writings of Northrop Frye (1957) and Les-
lie Piedler (1960) and, in general, the whole school of "myth
criticism."

Particularly important in second-phase psychoanalysis for
literary studies were the enlarged conception of defense, the
increased interest in early, pre-oedipal child development, and the
structural hypothesis of id, ego, and superego. Freud had mostly
ceased writing on literature by 1923. Even so, some of his earlier
works illustrate what his second-phase writing on literature might
have been like-his studies of jokes and humor, the legend of the
Medusa's Head, the theme of beauty's transience (an essay
prompted by Rilke), or the "uncanny" in ghost stories (see Strachey
1961). These more advanced writings all have less to do with the
author or with a character thought of as a real person, more with the
audience and an assumed collective response to a literary stimulus.

b. Biography
In addition, biographical work based on second-phase (and
first-phase) psychoanalysis continues to the present by such biog-
raphers as Leon Edel, Justin Kaplan, Bernard Meyer, Norman
Fruman, Cynthia Wolff, and many others. Often, it is difficult to
detect a biographer's theoretical framework since the best writers
follow Edel's advice and avoid psychoanalytic jargon. Second-phase

LITERATURE-AND-PSYCHOLOGY

psychobiography represented a marked improvement over first-
phase. Where the first-phase biographer (Bonaparte, for example)
tended to reduce adult achievement to childhood problems, a biog-
rapher using second-phase theory could show how the work of the
adult both grew from and coped with crises recognizable in the child-
hood of the artist.

c. Criticism and theory

Second-phase psychoanalytic theory made a more powerful
poetics possible. Otto Rank, although by this time he had broken
with Freud, developed the role of art in fantasies of immortality.
Ernst Kris and Charles Mauron were able to integrate the new ego-
psychology of multiple defenses into studies of the writing process.
Mauron in particular related particular styles of defense to special,
personal styles of writing. Ella Freeman Sharpe (1950) and Robert
Rogers (1978) showed how the new theories could explicate the psy-
chological function of metaphors and other poetic language.
Kris, Simon Lesser, and Norman Holland used ego psychology
to study the response to literary texts (still an assumed and collective
response). Reflecting the new complexity in the theory of defenses,
Kris treated the creation of and response to literature as "regression
in the service of the ego" (1952). Lesser showed how literature
makes differing appeals to id, ego, and superego (1957), and Robert
Waelder demonstrated the same for the visual arts (1965). Marshall
Bush (1967) and Pinchas Noy (1979) showed the importance of the
ego to understanding literary forms; Angus Fletcher its importance
for understanding genre (1964). Holland (1968) developed a model
of literature as a fantasy modified by poetic forms (analogous to psy-
chological defenses) toward a meaning. Where first-phase psycho-
analytic critics felt they could analyze only persons, either writers or
characters, these second-phase critics could use the new theories of

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defense to consider pure forms, like lyric poetry and nonfiction
prose. They were able to extend psychoanalytic criticism, then,
beyond literature and movies to the visual arts (Gombrich 1954;
Ehrenzweig 1967; Fuller 1980), even to abstract forms (Andersen
1971; Kutash 1982), or music (Noy 1966-67; Feder et al. 1989). The
anthologies by Ruitenbeek (1964), the Manheims (1966), or Tennen-
house (1976) provide good samples of second-phase psychoanalytic
criticism. Skura (1981) represents a bridge between the strong
scientism of second-phase psychoanalytic criticism and a more fluid
sense of both criticism and psychoanalysis as related processes.

Although Erik Erikson's theories have greatly influenced politi-
cal and historical thought in English-speaking countries, his teaching
has had much less influence on Continental psychoanalysis (notably
French) or literary criticism and theory. But see Franzosa 1973;
Mazlish 1970; Noland 1979; and Lebeaux 1977, as well as Erikson's
own studies in 1976 of George Bernard Shaw and Bergman's ilm,
Wild Strawberries. Erikson's ideas have affected literature-and-
psychology more as a matter of tone, encouraging literary critics to
do less by way of an "originology" or "id-psychology," more in terms
of the adaptive, ego-syntonic function of literature for its author.
His famous essay on Freud's Irma dream (1968) encouraged atten-
tion to the manifest content of the dream, and this corresponds to
second-phase literature-and-psychology's emphasis on literary form.

UTERATURE-AND-PSYCHOLOGY 41

b. Object-relations theory:
Arising out of the theories of Melanie Klein as revised by the
London "middle school" of psychoanalysis, object-relations theory
replaced Freud's instinctual-biological grounding of human motiva-
tion (Hughes 1989). (By object, of course, the psychoanalyst means
"significant other," usually another person-parent, child, lover-but
occasionally a thing.) Instead of imagining the human infant
developing because it is propelled from within or behind, as it were,
by a series of physiological urges, the object-relations school sees the
developing child as creating and being created by its relations with
mother, father, siblings, and playmates. Then, as in all psycho-
analytic theory, the themes of the child persist, expressed in new
modes, in the adult. In particular, both theory and observation indi-
cate a crucial period early in life when the child felt it was not yet
separate from its mother. Holland (1968) was able to show how this
early experience could explain our feeling of being "absorbed" by lit-
erature later in ife.
While the object-relations school as a whole has had an impor-
tant influence on theory and therapy in England and America, only
the writings of the pediatrician-psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, espe-
cially the transitional object and potential space, have had much
influence on literary thought. Winnicott imagined the relationship
between mother and child as a potential space, a space in which the
"nursing couple" are not differentiated, and in which various transi-
tional processes could take place, creating the capacity for illusion,
play, and creativity in later life. Similarly, a transitional object is a
teddy bear or security cloth that the child uses to alleviate the stress
of separation and individuation from the mother. Such an object
both is itself and is-not-but-merely-represents the mother or other
significant object. It can comfort, yet it is, finally, only a thing. The
transitional object serves as a prototype for all situations later in life

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when we use symbolisms to sustain ourselves. It is the forerunner of
all important values and possessions, including works of art.
These ideas have influenced literary theory. In particular, as
Murray Schwartz has shown (1975), Winnicott's concepts enable us
to understand how a literary work feels both "in here" and "out
there." It is, precisely, a transitional object in potential space (see
also Bollas 1987; Grolnick & Barkin 1978). This way of thinking
about the relationship between a reader and a text provides an
important dimension to reader-response criticism (see b-i. below).
Moreover, the theoretical move prescribed by the object-relations
school, away from instinct and toward human relationships, has led
to an important new approach to Shakespeare, a reading of the kinds
of relationships in which his imagination works (see the Schwartz &
Kahn anthology [1980]). Similarly, it opens up an approach to the
visual arts in terms of the kinds of human styles and relationships
represented (Fuller 1980; Milner 1957). Increased attention to the
relationships of the first year of life coincides with the investigation
of infants' and children's cognitive skills and ties this branch of psy-
choanalytic criticism to some current work in cognitive psychology
(see h).

b-i. Modern Jungian criticism:
Here again, psychoanalysis and archetypal psychology touch.
Winnicott's interest in the potential space between artist and work of
art and between work of art and audience finds an echo in the work
of James Hillman (1975, 1983). Hillman used something implicit in
Jung's thinking to expand his clinical insights to a phenomenological
study of imagination and language. Just as Winnicolt uses free asso-
ciations to unfold the potential space, so Hillman uses images. Paul
Kugler has contributed another summary:

UTERATURE-AND-PSYCHOLOGY

The most influential figure in the reformulation of
archetypal criticism is Jungian psychoanalyst James Hillman.
To extend Jungian psychology beyond clinical practice to a
study of Western imagination, Hillman calls for a "post-
analytic consciousness" committed to an articulation of the
"poetic basis of mind." Hillman's phenomenological view of
mind holds fantasy images to be the means by which con-
sciousness and self-consciousness are possible and through
which the world is imagined. Work with images, whether in
therapeutic, cultural, or literary analysis, has become as much
work on the process of seeing as on the object seen.
The shift from Jung to Hillman may perhaps be best
illustrated in their differing approaches to alchemy. Where
Jung writes an "objective" and "empirical" psychology of
alchemy, Hillman tries instead to provide an experiential
closeness to the alchemical images and tropes themselves. In
writing about "silver and the white earth," Hillman intends
his writing, like a poem, to bear traces of "silver," to become
a "silver mine," unearthing and performing the images'
tropological structure. The metaphor of silver "author-izes"
the actual style of writing and internal logic of the text. As a
mode of psychological criticism Hillman's new archetypal psy-
chology assumes a literary work brings with it the very
hermeneutics imagess and tropes) by which it can be inter-
preted.

Kugler himself further developed the interrelation between
alchemy and the poetic dimension of language (1982). He focused
primarily on the interrelation between consciousness, language
(texts), and images. Consciousness is continually being imagined
(imaged, in-formed) by the metaphors in the very text it is writing or
reading. Other modern Jungian critics have connected their psychol-

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ogy to Heideggerian philosophy, deconstructionism, and notions of
nothingness and emptiness from Zen Buddhism, but they would take
us far afield.

In 1961 Heinz Lichtenstein drew on third-phase psycho-
analysis's concern with the early relation of mother to child to con-
clude that human identity was established in that relationship and
could thereafter be read, like music, as a theme (a way of being the
child for this mother) and lifelong variations on that theme. One
could thus show in detail the thematic relationship between a
writer's life history and life style and literary style, as Lichtenstein
did with Thomas Chatterton (1977, ch. 10). Subsequently, Holland
showed how personal style (or identity) controlled the actual (as
opposed to the assumed) response to literature (1975a, b, 1988) and
to jokes (1982). Identity thus became an important theme in reader-
response criticism. In the "Delphi" seminars Holland, Schwartz, and
some of their students showed how one could use students' reading
and writing styles to explore personal identity in the classroom (Hol-
land & Schwartz 1975; Holland 1977, 1978). Holland has also shown
how Lichtenstein's identity theory provides a bridge between psycho-
analysis and cognitive psychology (1985, 1988).

In the United States, some literary critics have built on the
work of Karen Homey, whose theories reflect this second-phase psy-
choanalytic interest in defensive patterns and object relations. By
accenting early childhood, libidinal phases, and sexuality less than
other psychoanalytic critics, third force psychological critics (those,
for example, in Bernard Paris's 1986 collection) have been able to
write more realistically about authors and characters. Third-force
criticism has added importantly to mimetic criticism, the treatment
of literary events and characters as imitations (in Aristotle's sense)
of real people.

e. "French Freud" -is primarily Lacan:

the mirror stage
the signifier-signified relation and itsglissement
desire and demand
the Real, the Imaginary, the Symbolic
the penis/phallus
nom du pNre

Central to Lacan's theory is an idea that has permeated French
thought since World War II, namely, that the self is a "psychologiz-
ing," reactionary fiction. His thought colored by this bias, Lacan

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renders the self as split and de-centered. Conscious and unconscious
are not just discontinuous but opposed.
The split begins in the so-called mirror stage posited by Lacan,
a primary moment of alienation (related to Freud's early papers on
splitting in the ego). The infant sees a unified image in a mirror and
seeks to be that unrealizable ideal. But the child is in fact frag-
mented, created by the desires of its parents, and living in the alien
linguistic system created by its culture. The second important
moment for the developing child comes when it enters that linguistic
world in Lacan's version of the oedipus complex. The child's pre-
oedipal relation to its mother is imaginary (i.e., conducted in images,
pre-verbal). As that dyadic relation becomes a triad including the
father, the father introduces the principle of law, the name of the
father, le nom du pdre. Le non: du pdre involves the linguistic cuts or
"differences" that in Saussure's linguistics "signify" meanings.
Hence Lacan equates le nom du pere with castration in the classical
oedipus complex.
With Lacan, as with Saussure, signifiers (words) simply signify
as a lamp emits light. Hence, says Lacan, because we cannot control
language, we cannot say what we mean. Nothing is as it seems.
Every intellectual discourse runs contrary to unconscious truth. Ego
psychology is wrong in trying to ally the self with the ego. For
Lacan, then, the ego is the carrier of neurosis and self-deception.
Therapy should aim, not to strengthen the ego (as in American ego-
psychology) but to recognize the split, de-centered self, which is "the
truth of the subject."
This kind of thinking appeals strongly to intellectuals because
culture and language (at which intellectuals are adept) replace the
biological models of classical and second-phase psychoanalysis. The
mind is determined by language, not by organs of the body or brain
and not by the object-relations of British theory. For therapy, Lacan

LITERATURE-AND-PSYCHOLOGY

substitutes a search for truth, which he called "science," a science far
more like linguistics or philosophy than neurology or psychology.
He stands for rebellion against the International Psycho-Analytic
Association, the American ego-psychologists, the ego, and indeed
the very idea of free will or an autonomous self. Lacan sees all of
them as adaptations to culture, when the truth is that the individual
is alienated from language, culture, and, most generally, the Other.
These have structured the individual's own unconscious, which is
opposed to the conscious ego. Lacan therefore proclaims that psy-
choanalysis must subvert every kind of intellectual establishment.
All this, of course, has made Lacan a favorite of the intellectual
establishment.
Lacan wrote in an avowedly obscure style. In effect, he used
the materials of first-phase psychoanalysis (the oedipal paradigm,
the phallus, castration) as the language in which to express third-
phase concerns like self, object relations, psychosis, or cognitive
functions (Schwartz & Willbern 1982, 215-216). As a result much
Lacanian literary theory simply tries to explicate Lacan (see ch. 3,
3.e).
Nevertheless, so far as literature-and-psychology is concerned,
Lacan rested important psychoanalytic ideas on analyses of Poe's
"Purloined Letter" (1956b) and Hamlet (1959), and his commentary
on Joyce is interesting (1987). Lacan's psychoanalysis entered the
American literary world in an issue of Yale French Studies punningly
called "French Freud" (Mehlman 1972; see also Felman 1982, 1987).
Many Lacanian critics have begun to work on specific texts (Bersani
1977, 1986; Felman 1978; Hartman 1978; Davis 1981; Silhol 1984),
although much Lacanian writing is "theory" halfway between psy-
chology and literary theory. Grimaud's 1982 survey is particularly
apposite. Current criticism appears in the journals Littoral and
Omicar?, and current bibliography of both literary and psychological

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materials in Newsletter of the Freudian Field. Lacan's own writings
are still being published (1975-). A helpful bibliographical note is
that in Ragland-Sullivan (1986).
Lacan has proved highly influential in film criticism, where
Christian Metz (1982), Stephen Heath (1981), and many other
theorists have applied Lacanian psychoanalysis to articulate the ways
audiences are "sutured" into films through the gaps created by edit-
ing. The anthologies by Nichols (1976), Mast and Cohen (1985), and
Ann Kaplan (1989) offer a sampling of this line of work and Andrew
(1984, ch. 8) and Gabbard and Gabbard (1987, ch. 7) provide sur-
veys. Lacan has also proved influential in feminism (see 3-g).
Lacanian psychoanalysis meshes with the claims of such French
thinkers as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, or Jacques Derrida,
who treat language as an active, autonomous system, and the
speaker as passive (Wright 1984, pts. 3 and 4). Lacan's de-centered
self leads to the impossibility of arriving at textual meaning-another
major premise of postmodern thought. Lacan is therefore widely
read in literary circles, more so than earlier versions of literature-
and-psychoanalysis. Paradoxically, however, this version of psycho-
analysis minimizes the importance of the actual free associating per-
son on whom the entire edifice of psychoanalysis rests.
That is one of my three objections to this version of psycho-
analysis: the assumption that the self is disunified because conscious
and unconscious are opposed. That is only an assumption, a bias or
prejudice, really. There is no evidence for it, neither experimental
evidence from psychologists nor clinical evidence from first- or
second-phase psychoanalysts. How, for example, does it fit the well-
known experience of sublimation? This claim, that conscious and
unconscious self are opposed, is only one example of a basic pattern
in Lacan's thinking. He characteristically renders as either-or or as
an opposition what had previously made sense as both-and or an

In the United States, psychoanalysts have become increasingly
concerned with the treatment of so-called borderline personalities,
illnesses characteristic of late twentieth-century individuals and
rooted in the pre-oedipal relationship of the infant to its earliest
caregiver. The writings of Heinz Kohut have been particularly
influential in the development of new theories of empathy and narcis-
sism. Kohut goes so far as to suggest stages of development of self-
esteem parallel to the classical psychoanalytic stages of development
of libido (oral, anal, and so on). Otto Kernberg has put forward a
concept of the child developing through clusters of self-object-affect
relations. For both writers the concept of a self-object with whom
the infant or adult may merge is important and may provide a pat-
tern for relationships to literature. These ideas are just beginning to
percolate literary circles, but there has already been one anthology

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of criticism (Layton & Shapiro 1986) based on the theory of narcis-
sism.

A particularly vigorous current in late twentieth-century
literature-and-psychology is feminist psychoanalytic criticism (see,
for example, the collections by Barr & Feldstein 1989 and Feldstein
& Roof 1989). It began in the 1960s with Friedan's social (1963) and
Millett's literary (1970) polemics. Both strenuously attacked first-
and second-phase psychoanalysis (especially American ego-
psychology). Psychoanalysts, they pointed out, claim a scientific
validity for penis envy and Freud's deprecating remarks about
women. Freud, however, failed to acknowledge any influence on his
ostensibly objective scientific views from his personal and social
biases. Psychoanalysts take the male psyche as a norm. Psycho-
analysts treat differences between men and women as women's
lacks. While acknowledging the truth of these charges, Mitchell
(1974) was more informed about psychoanalysts after Freud. She
opened, in effect, negotiations between feminism and psychoanalysis
by insisting on the usefulness of even a patriarchal psychology for
understanding the male-dominated society women face.
This first round drew two issues between the two disciplines.
How valid is the psychoanalytic account of woman? How much
force has psychoanalysis as a science? The first question even psy-
choanalysts concede: the psychoanalytic account of woman needs
(and by 1989 has received) revision. To the other question I see two

LIERATURE-ANDPSYCHOLOGY

general approaches. One, roughly Anglo-American, accepts psycho-
analysis as a scientific psychology but updates it. The other, roughly
Franco-American, substitutes Lacan's concept of psychoanalysis as
language or narrative and thereby reduces the claims of psycho-
analysis.
The Anglo-American approach can be more psychology than
literary criticism. Its ancestor would be Horey's early papers (col-
lected in 1967) critiquing the psychoanalytic account of woman
within the framework of psychoanalysis. Chodorow's powerful
rewriting of second-phase psychoanalysis in the light of English
object-relations theory (1978) provides a more sophisticated account
of both male and female development than first- or second-phase
psychoanalysis. She thus gives a basis for feminist readings of texts
(Gilbert & Gubar 1979, 1988-; Garner et al. 1985; Lenz et al. 1980),
readings that emphasize the role of gender in the process of creation
and in the finished text. Similarly the revised psychoanalytic account
of woman gives theory for distinguishing female readers from male
in reader-response criticism. Gardiner (1976) and Fetterley (1978)
note the difficulty of the woman reader reading under male notions
of how and what to read. Flynn and Schweickart's collection (1986)
gives feminist and female responses and theory (including cognitive
research) to explain them.
The Franco-American approach is more abstract. Where the
Anglo-Americans address real readers and situations, the Franco-
Americans polarize feminist questions into body and language.
Some conclusions come from "biological essentializing"-reasoning
from male and female anatomy. Others focus on the general idea of
man's (dominant) language-abstract, scientific, competitive-as
opposed to woman's language (see, for example, Marks & de
Courtivron 1980 or Gelfand & Hules 1985 or Moi 1987.) Social
critics in this group set the question of language in readings of

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society, particularly seen as monotheistic, capitalist, and patriarchal
(Irigaray 1974, 1977; Kristeva 1986). In a more literary vein, this
school sometimes rereads and rewrites Freud as if he were a literary
text (Cixous 1975). Others in this group privilege hysteria as woman
speaking against patriarchal society and medicine (Bernheimer &
Kahane 1985; Cixous & Cl6ment 1986). Strong feminist film
criticism has evolved from this line of thought: studies of the patriar-
chal interests of traditional, commercial cinema; the privileging of
the male gaze and the positioning of woman as gazed-at (Mulvey
1975; de Lauretis 1984); the allaying of male anxieties associated
with the female body (Mulvey 1975; see also Kristeva 1980).
Feminists have found in psychoanalytic psychology both a chal-
lenge and a resource. I consider myself a feminist and am in
sympathy with much of this writing. Out of necessity, however,
much of it shades off into social rather than literary criticism and is
beyond my purview here. As for what is strictly lit-and-psych, I
strongly prefer the Anglo-American school for two reasons. First,
although I share the postmodern idea that psychoanalysis and
science and history and biography are all narratives, one neverthe-
less has to recognize that they are different kinds of narratives.
Their makers play by different rules. Psychoanalysis, because it
claims to be a science (Holland 1985, part 3), has to touch down to
reality and evidence in ways that a novelist need not. One cannot
just revise psychoanalysis as if it were a story-not and keep it psy-
choanalysis. Second, as the Franco-American school pursues
rhetoric, I believe they create a paper feminism. They lose sight of
the real oppression of woman in the professions, in social and eco-
nomic structures, and in everyday life. In other words, I would
extend to this branch of feminist thought my general objection to the
Lacanian conversion of psychological causes and effects into mere
language. Both these failings seem to me classic instances of the

UTERATURE-AND-PSYCHOLOGY

omnipotence of thought that plagues literary critics, philosophers,
and psychoanalysts (see p. 60). Nevertheless feminist criticism in
both its branches has invigorated and reformed the whole discipline
of psychoanalysis.

h. Cognitive Psychology

There were I. A. Richards's (1924, 1929) and Morse Peckham's
(1965) somewhat eclectic use of psychology, an occasional nod to a
gestalt psychologist like Kurt Koffka (1935), or a mention of Jean
Piaget's work on the development of play and symbolic thought
(Beard 1969). Mostly, however, academic psychology did not begin
to attract the attention of literary critics or theorists until the 1970s.
Then cognitive science simply exploded (Gardner 1985). Poetics (-
1971- ) was the first journal to provide a forum on theory for both
literary scholars and scientists of les sciences de I'homme and
spurred three other journals, Spiel (1982- ), Empirical Studies of the
Arts (1983- ), and Metaphor and Symbolic Activity (1986-). First,
Russian formalists, then French structuralists and German text-
grammarians, and now many different kinds of literary theorists have
begun to draw on artificial intelligence, developmental and cognitive
psychology, and other subfields of "the mind's new science"
(Gardner's 1985 title), cognitive sciences that deal with poems,
stories, humor, metaphor-in general, symbolic activities.
For example, Metaphors We Live By (1980) by cognitive linguist
George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson shows that we often
think in a logic of metaphor, an argument they each greatly extended
in separate books in 1987: this metaphorical logic tells us a great
deal about the way our minds work. Similarly, Schank and Abelson's
work on computers' understandings of situations demonstrates that
much of remembering and thinking functions according to storylike
scenarios (1977). Together such research suggests that if metaphors

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and stories underlie the structure and functioning of the human con-
ceptual system, then a psychology of literature and the rhetorical
phenomena of everyday life must be central to any theory of the
mind (Beaugrande 1980). We need to understand how our expecta-
tions create suspense or interest in both real and fictional story-
worlds as we imagine impending catastrophes or alternative roads
not taken. These hypotheses do not come from the story alone (Jose
& Brewer 1984; Beaugrande & Colby 1979). They are learned and
internalized as part of culture, as shown by those, like Howard
Gardner and other workers at Harvard's Project Zero, who study
how children develop artistic ability and the capacity to formulate
hypotheses about stories and pictures (Perkins & Leondar 1977). A
similar process applies to music (Davies 1978). Likewise, David
Bordwell has shown how we respond to films by constructing them
through such schemata (1985), powerfully extending a very early
insight by Hugo Miinsterberg (1916).
In general, from a cognitive psychologist's perspective, 1980s
literary theory often rests on static ideas of "signifier-signified" or
"content" that do not accord with the active processes by which
people perceive and understand and the dynamic, "illogical"
processes by which they think and feel. The cultural codes and
canons people use to perceive things fit neatly into psychoanalysis's
understanding of the role of the individual in making and responding
to literature and the other arts. Putting this understanding into prac-
tice is the challenge for literature-and-cognitive-psychology.
Grimaud (1984) suggests a possible synthesis as does Holland (1988,
1985).

i. Reader-Response Criticism:

By "reader-response criticism," I mean criticism or theory that
focuses on the reader or audience and their experiencing of a text.

LUERATURE-AND-PSYCHOLOGY

Reader-response criticism, at least in its current American version,
touches on several of the methodologies of psychoanalysis's
"psychology of the self."
In a sense, of course, all literary criticism began and remains
reader-response criticism because literary theory always involves a
model of reading, even if it remains tacit. Plato's ban on poets, the
opposite critical claim (for the moral efficacy of literature),
Aristotle's catharsis, Longinus's sublime, and modem concepts like
Brecht's alienation-effect or the Russian formalists' "defamiliariza-
tion" all rest on assumptions about reader-response. In a more
specific sense, however, reader-response criticism refers to a group
of critics who explicitly study, not a text, but readers reading a text.
Reader-response criticism, in this specific sense, emerged from
1967-70 in America and Germany (see the surveys by, in chronologi-
cal order, Purves & Beach 1972; Segers 1975; Suleiman & Crosman
1980; Tompkins 1980; Holub 1984; Freund 1987). Important
predecessors would include I. A. Richards, who in 1929 analyzed a
group of Cambridge undergraduates' misreadings of poems, and
Louise Rosenblatt, whose 1937 book insisted on the unique relation-
ship of each reader to aesthetic texts. In opposition, a famous article
by Wimsatt and Beardsley in 1954 attacked the "affective fallacy."
To evaluate a poem in terms of its emotional effect, they said, was to
confuse the poem with its result. They thus assumed an "objective"
text, separate from its reader but entailing certain appropriate
responses, and this became a cornerstone of the "New Criticism."
The reader-response critic holds exactly the opposite view. A
"text" involves a psychological process in which author and reader
interact through a physical text. Critics often claim "objectivity," but
it is an illusion. One cannot read a text except by the processes by
which we perceive texts (and they are driven by our sense of the
text's relation to our feelings and values, including our ideas of how

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one ought to read a text). For the reader-response critic as for the
modern physicist probing the atom, the answer you get depends on
the question you ask.
Within this general position, critics (primarily in Germany and
the United States) have developed different versions of reader-
response theory, with the fundamental difference being between
those who regard individual differences in responses as important
and those who do not. One group of reader-response critics (largely
Continental) envisages a mostly uniform response to a text (with
unimportant personal variations). The other (an Anglo-American
group) sees individual variations as large enough to show the reader
in control at every point. The former say what is common in dif-
ferent readers' readings results from the text, while those who see
the reader in control explain what is common as resulting from com-
mon strategies and tactics for reading, individually applied by dif-
ferent readers. By and large, German and other Continental critics
tend to use generic and philosophical (nonpsychological) concepts of
the reader. The Americans tend to use actual individuals, some-
times the critic's own self (Fish), sometimes students and others free
associating (Bleich, Holland). As a result most American reader-
response critics (but few of the Continental) draw heavily on psy-
chology, often psychoanalytic psychology, since it addresses individu-
ality.
Among the Americans, Bleich pioneered the study of the actual
feelings and free associations of readers as early as 1967, and he has
applied his findings in four books both theoretically to model the
reading process and practically to reform the classroom teaching of
literature (1975, 1977, 1978, 1988; see also Grant 1987). After
examining the real responses of real readers, Holland in 1975 gave
up his second-phase account of the literary process (see 2-c) for a
third-phase model. A personal identity (defined as a theme and

LITERATURE-ANDPSYCHOLOGY

variations) uses the physical text and invariable codes (such as the
shapes of letters) and variable canons (different critical values, for
example) to build a response both like and unlike other responses
(see also 1986b and c and 1988). In earlier writings, Fish used "the"
reader to examine sequential, word-by-word responses to complex
sentences. Since 1976, however, he too has emphasized the real dif-
ferences among real readers using reading tactics endorsed by dif-
ferent schools of criticism and by the literary professoriate. The
journal Reader publishes a succession of articles using reader-
response theory in pedagogy.
The Anglo-American reader-response critics displace meaning,
structure, and the like from something "in" a text to a psychological
process and hence require a psychology. From the outset, psycho-
analytic psychology has provided critics like Bleich, Holland, or
Schwartz with techniques for analyzing the language of individual
responders. In the 1970s and 1980s, cognitive psychology, psychol-
inguistics, and neuroscience have provided increasingly powerful and
detailed models for the way readers read (Rumelhart 1977; Ander-
son et al. 1977; Dillon 1978; Sternberg 1985). In general, psychol-
ogists of reading and those who teach reading to illiterates or school-
children conclude, like reader-response critics, that readers make
meaning (Spiro et al. 1980; Smith 1982; Meek et al. 1982, 1983,
1985; Crowder 1982; Taylor & Taylor 1983). Further, most late-
twentieth-century psychology of perception supports the reader-
response idea that perceivers construct what they perceive. Hence
reader-response criticism can readily be extended to other arts like
cinema (Holland 1986b) or painting (as with art historian E. H.
Gombrich) or to the perception of events (as in the historiography of
Hayden White or the philosophy of science of those feminist
philosophers who envision a science that acknowledges the involve-
ment of the scientist-Harding & Hintikka 1983). Reader-response

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critics often share the concerns of feminist critics because they value
readings of a text not available to a white, male, middle-class,
Western reader. Hence reader-response criticism leads to explora-
tion of "gender and reading" (Flynn & Schweickart 1986).
In short, reader-response criticism touches on a variety of
themes in third-phase psychoanalysis: personal identity; the feminist
critique of psychoanalysis; the unconscious use of linguistic codes
(Lacan); the spectator or the "suture" of cinema; cognitive science,
notably personal styles of knowing and perceiving; and the Winnicot-
tian blurring of boundaries between self and other, in here and out
there. In many ways, reader-response criticism is, in the world of
literary criticism, the most practical embodiment of the basic psycho-
analytic insight that all knowledge is personal knowledge.

Epilogue

IN SOMETHING called an "epilogue," I am obviously going to be
even more personal than in the more dispassionate "guide" that
preceded it. I want to set down some dosing thoughts on the "truth"
of psychoanalysis. "Truth," what is "real," what we can all believe
and rely on-these issues matter to me, more perhaps than to others.
They form basic themes in my identity (perhaps because of a child-
hood with a lot of unreality in it-or things I wished were unreal and
didn't really know whether they were or not).
At any rate, this concern for what is true or real colors my pre-
sentation even of something so ostensibly impersonal as a list of
readings. It must, for the fundamental truth that psychoanalysis
teaches is, All knowledge is personal knowledge. Hence this
Guide-to enable you to have personal knowledge, at least of the
psychoanalytic literature. I cannot give you the even more important
personal knowledge of the psychoanalytic experience.
But if psychoanalysis teaches us that all knowledge is personal,
how can I speak of the "truth" of psychoanalysis? Even though I

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believe the truth of what I am about to say, that very truth says it is
opinion and belief, not "truth" in the conventional, absolute sense.
This is the postmodern paradox psychoanalysis leads us into and
leaves us in.
It is the sort of paradox with which modern literary and
philosophical writers about psychoanalysis like to toy. Playing with
verbal paradoxes leads to an abstract, philosophical kind of psycho-
analysis. Few concepts are grounded in clinical experience or expe-
rimental observation.
I associate this philosophizing of psychoanalysis largely with
Lacan's teaching and its various offshoots. They render psycho-
analysis merely language. Phalluses, fathers, castration, loss, the
oppression of women, psychological determinism itself, all become
simply words. This mental tactic seems to me a classic example of
what psychoanalysts term the omnipotence of thoughts or magical
thinking. That is, we sometimes attribute to thoughts (or language
or symbols) the powers of real things, and we exaggerate those
powers to magical proportions. Think of the way people get agitated
about flags, crucifixes, or sexual pictures. Think of the power or
eroticism or emotion they attribute to these symbols, although they
are, after all, only things. Literary people and philosophers attribute
magical powers to language, Lacanians attribute magical powers to
"signifying," superpatriots and politicians to flags, ayatollahs to
novels, fundamentalists to pornography. Magical thinking is an error
we all easily stumble into, but that is no reason to dive into it
eagerly, headfirst.
To be sure, Lacanians are correct to insist that psychoanalysis
takes place in language. And we postmodernists are correct to insist
that we cannot perceive apart from the symbolic structures in our
heads. That does not mean, as many literary people seem to write,
that these symbolic structures have the same kind of hard-edged

EPILOGUE

force as solids "out there" in the world beyond our fingertips and
our skulls.
I reject a philosophical, really a magical, version of psycho-
analysis, then, because I think it confuses words and things. I want
some proof of what psychoanalysis asserts, something the mind can
rest on more securely than the reasons one might believe, say,
Nietzsche or Saint Augustine.
I am not, however, advocating the opposite extreme: High
Church New York Psychoanalytic Institute orthodoxy as exposed in
Janet Malcolm's book. The delightful double entendre in its title,
Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, says it all. Nor do I advo-
cate the avant-garde of the International Psycho-Analytic Associa-
tion. All too often, in discussions both by conservative and third-
phase psychoanalysts, terms become almost metaphysical, they have
moved so far from testable experience. I am thinking of Winnicott's
"false self," Kohut's "empathy," Waelder's "ego pleasure," Hart-
mann's "will-processes," Khan's "space of illusion," Lacan's
"materiality"-indeed all too many of Lacan's concepts. Others, I
know, find such terms usable and useful. I, however, would be hard
put to decide whether a given action by a patient or therapist fits
within these terms or not.
As you might expect, given my predilection for the "true" and
the "real," the psychoanalysis I respect rests on observation and test-
ing. Even with psychoanalytic writers whose ideas I otherwise
admire and readily work with (Winnicott, for example), when their
terms cease to be the starting-point for some actual test, I become
uncertain and troubled. I need some feedback through the real
world. I distrust any version of psychoanalysis that gets too far away
from the actual experience of couch, clinic, or laboratory. I fear that
psychoanalysis, either in its most traditional form or its most radical,
postmodern versions, will turn into a twentieth-century scho-

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lasticism, in which not-very-monkish monks write ever more
abstruse commentaries on a canon of received texts. The omni-
potence of thoughts again.
I want to return to what seem to me a core of ideas, strongly
evidenced over decades of actual psychoanalytic experience. I would
like to start out again from such a core. The psychoanalysis I admire
is a science, albeit of a very paradoxical kind. It is paradoxical
because it redefines what science is (but more of that anon).
I know there is a canard circulated around intellectual circles
that psychoanalysis is untested and untestable. It is high time some-
one pointed out that this notion is purely and simply false. There is
a large body of psychological research that does just that-tests psy-
choanalytic ideas, confirming and sometimes disconfirming them.
Indeed, the list of books surveying this research is itself fairly long. I
have included two of the more recent in section 0-c of this Topical
Outline, but one can easily enough do one's own survey by looking
up "psychoanalysis" in Psychological Abstracts. There is also an
important annual volume, Empirical Studies of Psychoanalytic
Theories, edited by Joseph Masling, whose bibliographies hold a
wealth of such materials.
It is simply not true that psychoanalysis is untested or
untestable. It is true, of course, that, when subjected to experiment
or "empirical testing," not all psychoanalytic ideas have proved out.
Happily, Freud's boyish theories on women do not pass muster.
Neither does much of "metapsychology" or many of the impres-
sionistic memories and language of psychoanalysts. The terms I
have complained of, which cannot be defined or observed, of course,
do not get tested. Nevertheless, I can put my mind around a core of
psychoanalytic thought that supplies testable hypotheses, which have
been tested against the real world. This core feels like a firm set of

EPILOGUE

ideas for psychological and literary work, strong enough even for a
materialist like me.
What do I think constitutes that core? Out of the immense
technical literature psychoanalysis produces-and if you have ever
attended meetings of, say, the American Psychoanalytic Association,
you know that, once out from behind the couch, psychoanalysts who
have been muffling themselves hour after hour in self-imposed
silence can get very verbose indeed-out of that immense psycho-
analytic literature, I would pick six firm markers by which to navigate
in thinking about the human mind.
First and foremost is free association. I think it is Freud's most
fundamental discovery. You could even argue that it is the only
thing Freud discovered. All the rest followed more or less automati-
cally once people began free associating.
Free association means saying, without regard for relevance or
shame, whatever comes to mind. If a patient free associates in con-
nection with a symptom, a dream, a slip in speech, a lapse of
memory, or an error in writing, the patient will become aware
(against resistance) of some previously unconscious wish. Indeed, as
therapy ceased to be bound to the particular symptom or dream or
slip, it became clear that free association, just running along by itself
so to speak, would always reveal a resisted latent or unconscious
content underneath tolerated manifest or conscious behavior. Fur-
thermore, what was revealed would be not only a wish or duster of
wishes (a fantasy) but also the defense mechanisms by which the
patient shaped the unconscious material into consciously acceptable
speech. Still further, one could interpret any acceptable speech in
the same way. One could interpret the dreamer's account of a
dream this way. One could interpret the literary critic's interpreta-
tion of a text as well. Both express unconscious wishes and largely
unconscious defenses. That is, psychoanalytic clinical experience

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tells us about the kinds of wishes people are likely to have and the
kinds of defenses they are likely to use to manage those wishes. If
you look for wishes and defenses in a piece of language, you will find
them.
What you are finding is "the" unconscious. (My quotation
marks signal Freud's first-phase usage: the unconscious as a noun.)
Often said to be Freud's fundamental discovery, it seems to me to
follow from something still more fundamental: a way of getting at
"the" unconscious. Freud showed us how to discover "the" uncon-
scious through the language people choose. It is this speech of the
mind, this language-ridden human animal's conscious words and
actions yielding hitherto unconscious thoughts and feelings, that is
the factual foundation of psychoanalysis.
Speech is as much a fact as any other sound-as our senses
daily prove. The process of unconscious thoughts and feelings
emerging through speech is a hypothesis confirmed every hour in
any kind of "talking psychotherapy," whether it is psychoanalytic or
not. This process is the truth that psychoanalysis tells in pulse and
bone. If you have experienced it you know it is true. If you have not,
it is harder, of course, to credit but no less provably true. One can
demonstrate it by a variety of experimental techniques (hypnosis, for
example, or further free association). Clinical validation of these
unconscious processes rests on interpretation, to be sure. Neverthe-
less, one can compare different interpretations, and one can sift the
better from the worse.
These, then, are two of my six basic markers for charting the
mind: free association and the unknown, invisible thoughts cum feel-
ings that free association reveals-"the" unconscious (in the lan-
guage of the first phase). A third foundation for psychoanalysis is its
account of child development. Improbable as that account often

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sounds, it seems to me, quite simply, proven-and for an odd and
personal reason.
When I first tried applying psychoanalysis to literature, one
thing utterly convinced me of its validity. Writers who could not pos-
sibly have read Freud would nevertheless demonstrate in their writ-
ings clusters of imagery that are described only in psychoanalysis.
These clusters are the base of what psychoanalysts discover in ther-
apy with adults about the fantasies and drives of children, the so-
called psychoanalytic stages of child development. But you find
anality in Ben Jonson (first noticed by Edmund Wilson), Molibre,
Nikolai Gogol, Charles Dickens, or Gerard Manley Hopkins. You
find orality in Marlowe, Marvell, Keats, or George Bernard Shaw.
You find phallic images and traits in Aristophanes or Apuleius or
Boccaccio or Chaucer or Laurence Sterne or Mark Twain. And, of
course, you find oedipal fantasies in almost any plot that involves a
male-female triangle or sexual jealousy.
There was no way these writers could have read Freud and
deliberately imitated his account of the childhood stages. Indeed,
analysts themselves did not really spell out these clusters of imagery
until the 1920s and after, and I think my 1968 book was the first to
state them all in one place as literary occurrences.
These pre-Freudian imaginative writings seemed to me the
strongest kind of evidence for the "developmental" point of view of
psychoanalysis. They were proving what the psychoanalysts claimed:
the persistence of childhood themes in the adult. They were proving
it because these pre-Freudian writers were evidencing psychoanalytic
themes they could not conceivably have imitated in a deliberate,
studied way. Nor did the analysts developing these concepts refer to
these writers as examples for their theories. This was a wholly inde-
pendent corroboration.

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Furthermore, because these themes involved many details
within a given poem or story, not just a single image, they were more
persuasive than the discovery of a "Freudian symbol" or a parapraxis
or a pun here and there. Working with imagery convinced me that
these clusters, and the childhood stages of development that defined
them, had a psychological reality. What the psychoanalysts
recovered in adult analyses and what they claimed to have observed
in children, I found in literature. These things must be so.
Still further, I began to find these patterns of imagery in
intellectual writings as well as imaginative: essays by Arnold or Mill,
New Critical essays analyzing poetic texts (including my own
criticism), and, inevitably, Freud's own writings. Finding uncon-
scious fantasy materials in intellectual texts meant that conscious
thought grew from unconscious roots. No matter how adult or
abstruse what is being said, one can hear in it, using the "third ear"
Freud and the first generation of analysts gave us, childhood. There
is an unconscious dimension to everything we think or say, and we
can reach it through analysis of the language we use. As you can
imagine, this literary critic was very excited. All knowledge is per-
sonal knowledge.
The psychoanalytic account of child development thus makes
my third, and crucial, navigational marker. For my next I go on to
"character," a powerful second-phase concept. At first tied to child-
hood stages, one spoke of an "oral" or an "anal" or a "phallic" char-
acter. Then, as Freud's circle in the 1930s and later Anglo-American
analysts formulated it, character was a person's habitual way of deal-
ing with inner and outer reality. In the framework of ego-
psychology, character was the ego's habitual way of dealing with the
id, the superego, the repetition compulsion, and outer reality (see
the Topical Outline 2-c). The important word is "habitual." At any

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given moment the ego is balancing competing demands from these
four agencies. Character is the way it does so over and over again.
Interestingly (if parenthetically), the idea of "character" in this
theoretical sense seems never to have entered French psycho-
analysis. The term appears only as "character neurosis" in Daniel
Lagache's pre-Lacan textbook of psychoanalysis (which went
through ten editions from 1955 to 1971). Laplanche and Pontalis in
their authoritative psychoanalytic dictionary (1968) oriented toward
French psychoanalysis give, as the broadest sense, a dominance by
one or another psychic agency (say, the superego or the ego-ideal).
(What this leaves out is Waelder's "principle of multiple function.")
Lacan, of course, does not use the concept.
This lack is one reason French psychoanalysis looks so different
from English or American. It is all the more surprising because
French classical literature brought the genre of the literary
"character" to such a fine art. Perhaps it was in reaction to that neo-
classical tradition that, after World War II, French intellectuals
decided that an autonomous self was a bourgeois, capitalist fiction.
Even mentioning "identity" or such concepts can get you into
trouble among the French and their American disciples. Salons will
be as effectively dosed to you, wrote one of my French translators,
as if you had ordered bourbon with your tournedos.
In the early days, psychoanalysts would simply speak of an
"oral" character or an "anal" character. As psychoanalysis became
more sophisticated, analysts would include in a description of char-
acter a person's preferred or habitual defense mechanisms. By
defense mechanism in this context one can mean in the technical
definition, a mental tactic applied rapidly, unconsciously, and auto-
matically at a signal of danger. More generally, one might speak of
defenses as coping mechanisms or adaptations, ways of dealing with
outer as well as inner reality.

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Like the fantasies of the childhood stages, defenses (or adapta-
tions) became an immensely useful concept for me as a literary
critic. I could see them in literary texts, and not just in the actions of
realistic characters coping with the world. They corresponded to
literary forms. Metaphor was like displacement. Irony was like
reversal. Simile was a form of symbolization, as was metonymy.
Omission was like denial. Parallel plots were like splitting or isola-
tion. One could compare various literary maneuvers with the
defenses described in various psychoanalytic handbooks. Moreover,
a given writer would use one form or defense over and over again, in
preference to others. One could describe a style psychoanalytically,
then, not only in terms of content (characteristic fantasies) but also
in terms of form (characteristic defenses).
Second-phase psychoanalysts, however, continued to think of a
person's character as membership in a type or class: a diagnostic
category (for example, paranoid or obsessional), a libidinal stage
(oral or anal), or a preferred defense (denial, reversal,
intellectualization). Even in that form the concept seems to me valid
and useful. I think it is very like the literary critic's idea of "style."
Style in literature is simply the character of a writing. One can speak
of style as various types: pastoral or lyric or metaphysical or operatic.
These types, like the psychoanalytic categories, will serve for a first
approximation.
For a finer reading, however, the concept of a style should
point not only to a type but also an individuality. Within the general
type "pastoral," there is a Marlovian or a Marvellian or a Keatsian
pastoral. Similarly, all three of these poets use clusters of images
from the oral stage as described by psychoanalysts. They are oral
types. As a literary critic, though, I want to be able to use psycho-
analysis to describe them as individual styles or characters within the
general type "oral."

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I found a way to do that in Heinz Lichtenstein's 1961 version of
identity. Lichtenstein posited an identity made up of a theme and
variations, like a piece of music. Using this version of identity, one
could describe an individual as an individual rather than a class, just
as an account of a theme and its variations defines a unique piece of
music. For Lichtenstein, identity is a life history rendered as an
identity theme and a lifetime of variations on that theme.
Like characteristic defenses and character itself, the concept
seems to me a useful guide. I have seen identities (personal themes
and variations on those themes) over and over again- in writers, in
students, in colleagues and administrators, and in politicians. I have
seen identity in myself. Students in my classes regularly work with
one another's identities. Ordinary, nonpsychoanalytic people speak
readily of some act as being in or out of character, tacitly assuming a
concept of identity. "There he goes again" is a famous political mot.
I must also confess that there are a great many people out
there whom I have been unable to convince of identity in this sense.
I do not believe they reject it because they have tried to apply it and
found that it yielded no useful feedback. I think they reject the con-
cept because they have a prejudice against it. For example, people
see identity (correctly) as a form of "essentializing" or "thematiz-
ing," and current intellectuals think those are bad things. People
think (incorrectly) that identity does not allow for personal change
or novelty. People think the idea of identity is a capitalist,
imperialist concept that supports some reactionary political position
(for reasons that escape me). And so on. None of this do I find
convincing.
What would unsettle my conviction would be a genuine effort
to work with the concept that failed. If one does not choose to apply
this hypothesis, if one believes, for example, that the human subject
has been deconstructed (as many modern literary people claim), one

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will not, of course, see identity. That does not imply there is no such
thing as identity, only that one has chosen not to look for it.
When I say I have seen the hypothesis of identity work,
however, you should remember precisely what hypothesis has been
tested. Strictly speaking, the hypothesis is that one can interpret a
person as a theme and variations.
Unlike Lichtenstein, I do not wish to claim that an identity
theme is "in" a person. Lichtenstein borrowed the concept of
imprinting from animal studies. The best known examples are the
goslings who grew up thinking Konrad Lorenz was their mother
because he was there at the critical "imprinting" time after they
hatched.
I do not wish to adopt Lichtenstein's idea of an identity theme
"in" the person, even though there is increasing evidence of a grow-
ing and ungrowing in the infant mammalian brain that supports
Lichtenstein's view. Experience carves out in the infant's changing
brain particular synapses and pathways, those that the infant uses in
the experiences it is having. As infants we learned, in Lichtenstein's
phrase, to be the child for this particular mother (and father and cul-
ture). Our experience of doing so may well have wired an identity
into our brains (Holland 1988).
Nevertheless, for me, the identity we can use to understand
ourselves is not so much a structure in the mind as a way of inter-
preting a person as a theme and variations. Identity involves a
paradox and paradoxical implications. If it is true that I can inter-
pret any other human being as a theme and variations, then I can
interpret their interpretations of things as a theme and variations.
(We say, for example, that a given interpretation sounds like Dr.
Johnson or Coleridge or Ihab Hassan or Walter Ong.) If so, then,
you can do the same for me. You can see me (in this Guide, for
example) interpreting literature or psychoanalysis or your identity in

EPILOGUE

characteristic ways. That is, you can read my interpretations and
values and beliefs as functions of my identity (gleaned perhaps from
the first paragraph of this chapter). But in doing so you would be
interpreting as a function of your own identity. Even if identity were
"in" a person, by that very fact, you and I could not interpret such an
identity except through our own identities. None of us can interpret
or even perceive things except within our own identities as they
operate the processes by which we interpret and perceive.
The concept of identity thus lets us see how we human beings,
because we have personalities, are both enabled and limited by those
personalities. We can only know in the style in which we know
things. All knowledge is personal knowledge. We come back again
to that fundamental psychoanalytic truth.
Identity, then, is a hypothesis I apply to interpret people. It is
only one among many hypotheses we use to interpret the world, and
in saying that I come to another of my navigational landmarks,
namely, feedback. We perceive and interpret the world by a process
of applying hypotheses and seeing what we get back as the world
responds. This is not so much a psychoanalytic point of view as one
firmly established in cognitive science. It is the psychologists who
show us using feedback to perceive and know the world. Feedback
dovetails, however, with psychoanalytic concepts like identity.
Our culture offers us a repertoire of such hypotheses with
which to test and interpret the world. (Among them, of course, is
the identity I see in other individuals.) The hypotheses we choose
from that repertoire, the way we apply them, the way we interpret
the results, and the way we feel about what we get back-all are parts
of our feedback processes. All are aspects of our own personal
identity. Identity is what governs the myriad kinds of feedback, both
social and biological, that we use to see, to know, to remember,
learn, move, in short, to live.

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Feedback thus directs me to another psychoanalytic marker,
Winnicott's concept of potential space. This, too, I find another firm
point (even if it describes a blur). That is, Winnicott describes a
space between infant and mother (and later, between adult self and
other) in which "creative living" takes place. I understand that
phrase by means of this concept of feedback. Feedback implies that
the boundary between self and other is not a line or a thing or a
place but a process. We are continually testing. We are therefore
"between" inside and outside, past and future, inner self and "out
there." So is potential space. Feedback implies, like potential space,
an organism that is constantly testing and trying.
In infancy, our deepest preverbal being forms itself as we test
out a geometry of human relationships and physical space. As
infants (and as adults) we live in spaces of closeness, oneness, dis-
tance, presence, absence, and so on. Already, by the time a child
begins to speak, it has created a personal world that has a certain
shape, certain ways of relating, and certain ways of weighing the
importance of objects "out there." This is a style of being, an
identity theme, that someone else can trace from the adult to earliest
childhood. An older metaphysic of subject and object gives way in
our time to a sense that one cannot separate subject and object. It is
in the very nature of a subject to be always in relation to the world
around it through trying out hypotheses and responding to the
results. All knowledge is personal knowledge.
These, then, are my six navigational markers or, more
accurately, six fundamental hypotheses in psychoanalysis that I have
found true and useful:

This is, I know, a highly personal synthesis of psychoanalysis. I
am not sure any other psychoanalytic critic or any psychoanalyst
would say it the same way. Nevertheless, it seems to me these are
views widely held by psychoanalytic thinkers. The latest have led to
confirming feedback. They seem to me rich with potential. The ear-
liest are thoroughly established. They have withstood the challenges
of the nearly-a-century of psychology since Freud.
On an intellectual level, the most strenuous challenge has come
from those who claim that psychoanalysis is not "scientific" because
it is not testable. As we have seen, this objection is simply not true.
Able psychologists, working within a conventional definition of
science, have in fact tested psychoanalysis. But notice that this
objection does rest on the conventional definition of "scientific" in
which observation is independent of the observer.
To me, what is important about psychoanalysis vis-A-vis science
is that it challenges and, I think, changes that definition. Psycho-
analysis teaches us that all knowledge is knowledge by a person
through that person's hypotheses and therefore through their indi-
viduality and their culture. In other words, psychoanalysis jibes with
recent philosophy of science to say the conclusions of science are not
an absolute because the methods of science are not. Science, both
its conclusions and its methods, is relative to a particular historical
and cultural way of doing science. Psychoanalysis's special contribu-
tion is to point out that science is also relative to a particular individ-
ual style of doing science. Understood this way, psychoanalysis is
the science that tells us what other sciences are, because it con-
ceptualizes the individual human beings who do science.

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On a practical level, as any American psychoanalyst will tell
you, the biggest challenge to psychoanalysis has come from the ther-
apies that have grown out of psychoanalysis. The challenge is partic-
ularly strong in America because of the question of insurance
coverage ("third-party payments"). Insurers, patients, and therapists
alike have recognized that any one of the psychotherapies that have
spun off from psychoanalysis itself may suffice to relieve symptoms,
allay anxiety, or surmount a crisis. No insurance company will pay
for three-to-seven years of five-hour-a-week psychoanalysis if some
months of one-hour-a-week or two-hour-a-week psychotherapy will
cure. Thus another sorry result of our misshapen health policies in
the United States is that clerks in insurance companies look over the
therapist's shoulder. It is they who decide what is or is not
appropriate even in this most private of treatments, psychotherapy.
Psychoanalysis may no longer be the treatment of choice, but
something else: an education, a way of systematically studying
oneself. For that reason it may serve best today as education for
psychiatrists and others planning to be psychotherapists. For them
the full course is absolutely essential. I find it hard to imagine
anyone who intends to practice a "talking cure" who does not need
the special insight into self and others the experience of psycho-
analysis gives. I find it equally hard to imagine how someone could
do worthwhile psychoanalytic criticism without what one of the finest
practitioners of the art, Leon Edel, calls a "true inwardness." To do
"literary psychology," he writes, one must understand one's dreams,
one's instincts, one's anxieties, one's personal symbols, the way one
uses fancy to defend oneself within the daily complexities of life.
Above all, one must seek out one's "hidden and anxious persona"
(Edel 1981, 465). Only an experience of psychoanalysis can give that
sense of the self. Only a psychoanalytic experience can tell the

EPILOGUE

literary critic what he or she is bringing to the literature. I do not
see how a psychological critic can do without it.
Similarly, I find it hard to believe that "the mind's new science"
will not profit from psychoanalytic psychology. Psychoanalysis is the
best way we have of conceptualizing individuality or, if you will, sub-
jectivity. I believe there are connections to be made between brain
physiology, modern psycholinguistics, artificial intelligence, and cog-
nitive psychology. I have mentioned some writers in these areas in
Chapters 3 and 4, and I have tried to make some of these connec-
tions myself in The I.
In that mode, I can paraphrase Matthew Arnold (and echo
something I wrote in 1961, when I first became interested in
literature-and-psychoanalysis): the future of psychoanalysis is
immense. I believe we are about to relive Freud's vision of psycho-
analysis alongside neurology and the biological sciences. I believe
we are looking toward a fourth phase of psychoanalysis: psycho-
analysis as one contributor to a very much larger science of the
mind. I cannot suggest, as with the earlier phases, a fundamental
polarity of explanation (conscious vs. unconscious, for example), for
such a science seems to me necessarily paradoxical. Psychoanalysis
teaches us that all knowledge, including any such science of the
mind, will be a personal knowledge. I do not know-perhaps no one
yet knows-how to "explain" in such terms.
I feel sure that we shall have to learn, however. If there is one
axiom that psychoanalysis gives us, it is that whatever truth we seek
"out there," to find it, we shall also have to look within and look
back, back into the past and deep within our own minds. That is why
this Guide is written the way it is and why it reaches the conclusions
it does-because all we say and do and know has a personal dimen-
sion. That is a psychoanalytic truth that I believe will still hold, no
matter how many years from now I were to update this Epilogue.

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And now, for something completely different

Personal knowledge. A friend who knows me all too well once
said that when I really, really want people to believe what I am
saying I make it into a joke. I think that is why I decided not to end
this too-serious Guide on such a solemn note. Surely we need a final
grin and an acknowledgment of the kinds of fun one can have in this
field. Not only is there no fee, this is at the expense of psycho-
analysis. All work and no play makes psychoanalysts stray.
I'm thinking of the cartoon books like Appignanesi and
Zarate's Freud for Beginners, a surprisingly accurate introduction
whose accuracy doesn't cancel out the wit of the cartoons. Or Ralph
Steadman's Sigmund Freud, cartoons in the manner of Ronald
Searle that mostly sample Freud's theory of jokes. A star in the
canon of psychoanalytic joke books is Freud's Own Cookbook, edited
by James Hillman and Charles Boer (a pair of Jungians!). It fea-
tures Momovers, Erogenous Scones, Little Hansburgers, Super-
egonog, and other delights of the oral stage as well as a thoroughly
irreverent commentary by der goldener Sigi himself. Another star is
Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality, a series of papers from
the Journal of Polymorphous Perversity on such topics as "Buddha
Meets Kohut," "New Improved Delusions," or "Psychotherapy of
the Dead" (Ellenbogen 1986). And now there is a sequel, The
Primal Whimper (Ellenbogen 1989).
To the Freud fan, hilarious highlights in any collection of
parodies of Freud are the opening chapters of D. M. Thomas's
otherwise transcendently somber novel, The White Hotel. In the
opening chapter this imitator par excellence brilliantly invents a
series of letters to and from Freud and his inner circle in the styles
we have come to know and smile at. In the third chapter he creates

EPILOGUE

a whole case history in Freud's own manner. These are not to be
missed (and, of course, the novel as a whole is a stunning perform-
ance).
Much more of a pop novel is Judith Rossner's August (1983),
yet for all that it gives an accurate picture of a New York psycho-
analysis today. The analyst, whose own life is something of a sham-
bles, is trying to help a beautiful but troubled Barnard freshman.
August is the month in which analysts traditionally take their vaca-
tions, and Rossner's novel makes a fascinating study of separation
anxiety.
Paul Buttonwieser's Free Association (1981) takes us to the very
beach in Wellfleet, Cape Cod (once the retreat of Edmund Wilson
and Mary McCarthy), where nowadays East Coast analysts go in
August. (It is said to be the only beach in America where, if you lie
down to sunbathe and strike up a conversation with a stranger, you
will receive a bill the next day.) Buttonwieser paints a delightfully
satiric (not satyric!) picture of the New York psychoanalytic scene,
both on and off vacation. The novel details the experiences of a
pathetically sex-starved psychoanalytic candidate. He answers an ad
in the Village Voice: "SJF, 27, into art, tennis, politics, seeks SM 25-
35 ... let come what may!" What comes is that the SJF turns out to
be one of his patients.
Samuel Shem's Fine (1985) uses all the puns that that title, the
analyst-hero's name, makes possible. He looks with jaundiced eye at
the Boston psychoanalytic scene and comes out in favor of life with a
capital L instead of analysis with a capital A.
Buttonwieser's version of the New York Psychoanalytic
Institute appears in more serious form in Janet Malcolm's well-
known essay, Psychoanalysis: 77e Impossible Profession (1981), a
painfully funny journalistic study of psychoanalysis as an institution,
at least in one of most orthodox American incarnations. (For the

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French version of that institution, see Sherry Turkle's Psychoanalytic
Politics, and for the English, see Phyllis Grosskurth's Melanie Klein,
both more scholarly accounts.) Another of Janet Malcolm's journal-
istic studies of psychoanalysis is also not to be missed. Her In the
Freud Archives is like an old movie: Abbott and Costello Meet
Frankenstein. Here, two obsessionals meet a psychopath. Malcolm
tells the story of Jeffrey Masson's appointment by Kurt Eissler as
Secretary of the Freud Archives, followed by his supposed discovery
of the "real" reason Freud rejected his hypothesis that the cause of
hysteria was actual seductions, followed by Masson's being fired by
Eissler and Anna Freud, followed by lawsuits, books, and articles by
Masson. An unpleasant story that has its comic moments.
The core psychoanalytic novel is Italo Svevo's classic account of
his hero's efforts to quit smoking through psychoanalysis: Confes-
sions of Zeno. Of the more recent psychoanalytic novels I know, the
farthest out is surely Barry N. Malzberg's sci-fi novel, The Re-Making
of Sigmund Freud (1985) in which a reconstructed twenty-fourth
century Freud in a space suit tries to analyze a crazed Venusian
colonist and cure the hysterical pains of a Vegan alien. There are
dozens more collected and studied by Jeffrey Berman (1985). And
of course there are plays: Saul Bellow's The Last Analysis and even
the well-known musical, Kurt Weill's Lady in the Dark.
To say nothing of the movies. The most authentic is G. W.
Pabst's Secrets of a Soul (Geheimnisse einer Seele [1926]). Freud
refused even to see Sam Goldwyn when that archetypal Hollywood
producer proposed to consult "the greatest love expert in the world."
Likewise, when the huge German production company UFA asked
Freud to act as technical adviser to Pabst's film, he again refused.
Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs, however, did agree to do it, and the
movie does depict (in cinematic language!) classical, first-phase psy-
choanalysis. A disturbed man meets a stranger in a bar, and they

EPILOGUE

begin a conversation. Much is made of keys, locks, umbrellas,
spikes, and other symbols, which the stranger proudly decodes and
then proclaims, "I am a psychoanalyst." Unintentionally funny,
audiences laugh at this quaint version of psychoanalysis, but it is the
nearest thing we have to a film Freud himself might have okayed.
But then Freud didn't like the movies (except for Charlie Chaplin).
A more famous version is John Huston's Freud (1961), starring
Montgomery Clift in the title role. Clift's facial muscles had been
badly cut in an automobile accident, and he was thereby able to
maintain a stolid "analytic neutrality" even in this cinematic, but
otherwise fairly preposterous film. When it was re-released, a sub-
title was added that gives something of the flavor: it became Freud"
The Secret Passion. In the same vein, Huston's voice-over intro-
duced the movie as "the story of Freud's descent into a region
almost as black as hell itself-man's unconscious-and how he let in
the light." What would Freud have said to these almost Christ-like
terms?
To make Freud's years of painful self-analysis and discovery
into a movie, Huston collapsed it all into a single night. He has Sig-
mund sitting up till daybreak excitedly telling Martha the method of
free association, the cause and cure of neuroses, the oedipus com-
plex, the reason we laugh at jokes, the secret of dreams, and on and
on. Finally, he throws the curtains open to light and the new dawn.
That is called symbolism.
Even more remarkable than the picture itself was what went on
before the picture. Huston decided that only one man in the world
could write a movie about Freud-Jean-Paul Sartre. In addition,
Huston and Sartre wanted Marilyn Monroe for the role of Frau
Cacilie (the composite patient who is the heroine). Monroe's analyst
objected, saying Anna Freud would oppose such a plan. Sartre was
perhaps enough all by himself. He created the startling image of a

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bored Freud massaging the thighs and bottom of Cadlie lying on her
stomach clad only in her underwear and black stockings. This per-
haps tells us more about Sartre than Freud. Ultimately, Sartre's
script had to be rejected as hopelessly too long. It would have made
a seven-hour movie. "One could make a movie four hours long if it
is about Ben Hur," Sartre later sneered, "but the public in Texas will
not stand for four hours of complexes." Huston turned to a couple
of Hollywood regulars for his final script.
Huston was not the only major director to deal with psycho-
analysis and psychiatry. There are Ingmar Bergman's rich, if som-
ber, studies. There is the ending to Hitchcock's Psycho (1960),
where Dr. Richmond explains it all. Apparently, Hitchcock himself
meant it seriously. Others (myself, for example) think it parody.
Then there is Ingrid Bergman's lovesick cure of Gregory Peck in
Spellbound (1945). Again Hitchcock seems to think he has
portrayed psychoanalysts realistically. Again it seems more like
parody--except for the senior training analyst played by the
gemiitlich Michael Chekhov (the playwright's nephew).
The one moviemaker for whom psychoanalysis has proved an
endless gold mine is, of course, Woody Allen. As he says in Hannah
and her Sisters (1986): "I was in analysis for years. Nothing hap-
pened. My analyst got so frustrated, the poor guy, that he put in a
salad bar." Allen seems to be making back both the fees he paid
and whatever positive transference he had. In Stardust Memories
(1980), he fantasies a huge hairy monster that represents "Sidney
Finkelstein's hostility." Surrounded by the dead bodies of all the
people Sidney bates, the monster is pursued by police and hunting
dogs, when a man in a dark raincoat steps toward the monster and
calls out, "Please, uh, we don't want to hurt you. We ... we want to
reason with you. I'm a psychoanalyst. This is my pipe." Sometimes
a pipe is only a pipe.

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If only the Hollywood types drawn to psychoanalysis were as
knowledgeable as Woody Allen. Krin and Glen O. Gabbard in their
definitive survey (on which I am drawing extensively and gratefully)
list some 271, count 'em, 271 movies, mostly Hollywood, that use
psychiatry as a large or small part. Their list begins auspiciously
with the immortal Dr Dippy's Sanitarium in 1906 and runs to Down
and Out in Beverly Hills eighty years later.
There are some well-known and quite wonderful movies among
the 271 that feature psychoanalysts or psychiatrists. Some treat
psychiatry reverently: David and Lisa (1962) or Ordinary People
(1980). Slightly less reverent are Woody Allen's movies: Annie Hall
(1977) or Interiors (1978) or Zelig (1983) where the Human
Chameleon joins the Freud circle. Still less reverent are the great
screwball comedies, which often featured a buffoon psychiatrist:
Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938) or His Girl Friday (1940)
or, in that same year, Garson Kanin's My Favorite Wife. Many of the
movies' classics have psychiatric episodes. There is a psychiatrist in
Tod Browning's wonderful Dracula (1931) who does not believe in
vampires, just as there is a psychiatrist in The Terminator (1984) who
does not believe in Arnold Schwarzenegger. Let us not forget that
there's a psychiatrist in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
(1971), or one of my favorites, Three Nuts in Search of a Bolt (1964).
In those 271 movies, a truly astonishing range of actors have
played psychiatrists: Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Vincent Price, and
Peter Sellers-you'd expect them, of course, but what about Fred
Astaire, Charles Boyer, and Hedy Lamarr? And let us not forget the
professor of psychology played by Ronald Reagan in Bedtime for
Bonzo (1951). He teaches a chimpanzee morality in that movie,
foreshadowing his later career. Alan Arkin played Freud in The
Seven Percent Solution (1976), a Freud who is called in, not for
psychiatry, but to help Sherlock Holmes cure his cocaine habit.

HOLLANDS GUIDE

Nevertheless, Arkin plays a particularly appealing Freud, one who
defeats and humiliates a pompous Austro-Hungarian anti-semite in
a tennis match by psyching out his backhand.
Among the many actors who have played patients and
analysands, surely the most unlikely is Elvis Presley in Wild in the
County (1961). In this script by no less than Clifford Odets, Hope
Lange plays Elvis Presley's psychiatrist. Although Presley dismisses
her statements about "transference" as "book talk," she cures him of
whatever and sends him off to college where, under the tutelage of a
likable English professor, he will grow up to be a William Faulkner,
all because he had "professional help."
From 1906 to 1986, we see Hollywood develop the standard
cliches of movie psychiatry. Patients get cured when, in one
astonishing moment, they remember some equally dramatic moment
from childhood. Psychiatrists are all Viennese. Female psychiatrists
are either hopelessly desexed or rescued from their grotesque
profession by the love of a good man that takes them into marriage
and motherhood.
The Gabbards trace a pattern in these 271 movies. At first,
Hollywood treats psychoanalysis or psychiatry as mysterious and for-
eign. The psychiatrist is stereotyped as a Viennese wearing a tail-
coat and a pince-nez, and he speaks with some kind of a Cherman
accent. Sometimes he is a quack, and always he is wrong or
ridiculous. Gradually, however, Hollywood begins to treat the
psychiatrist as having more and more power, sometimes of a
dangerous kind. Then, note the Gabbards, 1957-1963 marks a kind
of golden period when psychiatry is reverenced and idealized, and
we are shown sensitive, intelligent, American psychiatrists. After
that, come the years of "flower power" or Nixon-Reagan con-
servatism. Psychiatry is treated irreverently, for two opposite
reasons. Flower power sees it as dangerously repressive. Conserva-

EPILOGUE

lives see it as dangerously opening up possibilities. In these movies
the good, omniscient psychiatrist shades over into the powerful mis-
guider, the caring psychiatrist to the lecherous, the strong to the
murderous, and so on.
One of the most startling of these recent antipsychiatry movies
is Marshall Brickman's 1983 film Lovesick, in which from time to
time, Alec Guiness as the spirit of Freud appears to the lovesick psy-
choanalyst to offer cold comfort. "Psychoanalysis is an interesting
method," he says. "I never intended it to become an industry." Oh?
Then there is the BBC television series, Freud. Done in glow-
ing colors and lush d6cor by actors who remarkably resemble the
photos of those early days, it looks the most authentic and
"Viennese" of the filmed accounts. That is unfortunate, for its script
elevates gossip to the status of history: Freud's supposed homosexual
longings for his early confidant Fliess; Freud's supposed affair with
his wife's sister Minna. Much, naturally, is made of Freud's infatua-
tion with cocaine, indeed, to the point where it rather overshadows
his later discovery of psychoanalysis. (The French speak of cet
inconscience qui sniffait trop.)
Cartoons, novels, movies, television-these are only a few of the
marvels that await the assiduous researcher, aided, of course, by a
reader's guide like this. Imagine, for example, being able actually to
sit down and play the popular song of 1925 that John Burnham
(1978) refers to: "Don't Tell Me What You Dreamed Last Night,
For I've Been Reading Freud." A moment like that could repay a
lifetime of reading psychoanalysis. A moment like that, especially at
its merriest, will be a truly personal knowledge.

6

Research Aids

Prepared with the help of William McPhcron (Stanford University Libranes)
IHAVE ORGANIZED this list of research aids as follows:

Guides to the Literature
Dictionaries
Handbooks and Encyclopedias
Bibliographies, Indexes, and Abstracts
Directories
Other Useful Tools

I have marked with a pound sign (#) those items that seem to me
particularly relevant to psychoanalytic research (as opposed, say, to
bibliographies that cover all of psychology). I have marked with a
square bullet (.) those items that are particularly relevant and that
can be searched on-line through such information services as
DIALOG, BRS, INFOQUEST, or EASYLINK.

RESEARCH AIDS

GUIDES TO THE LITERATURE

Bell, James Edward. A Guide to Library Research in Psychology.
Dubuque IA: W. C. Brown, 1971.

# Grimaud, Michel. "Recent Trends in Psychoanalysis: A Survey,
with Emphasis on Psychological Criticism in English Literature
and Related Areas [in the Social Sciences]." Sub-Stance 13
(1976): 136-162.

# Grimaud, Michel. "Part Three: A Reader's Guide to Psycho-
analysis. An Overview of Psychoanalytic Theory and the Psycho-
analytic Approach in Literary Theory and Practice, with Empha-
sis on French Studies." William J. Berg, Michel Grimaud, and
George Moskos. Samnt/Oedipus: Psychocritical Approaches to
Flaubert's Ar. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1982.

The two extremely useful texts by Grimaud list and par-
tially annotate English and French materials in such
categories as: Reference Tools; Introductions to Psycho-
analysis; Psychoanalytic Journals; Classic Papers; Meth-
odology; and various specific topics (Dreams; Readers;
Feminism; Homosexuality, Myth; etc.) as well as literary
theory and criticism. The 1976 text includes an unusual
"Introductory Reading List."

As much essay as survey, this article notes that literary
critics rely primarily on psychologies of emotion and
motivation in their earliest versions (e.g., Freud, Jung, or
Homey). Grimaud summarizes recent psychoanalysis
(ego psychology, object-relations theory, self psychology,
Lacan) and relates the psychoanalytic account of cogni-
tive and psychosexual developmental stages to con-
temporary cognitive psychology. He urges a synthesis of
modern psychoanalysis and cognitive psychology and
shows how some American and German "poeticians"
are building it.

# Resources for the Psychoanalyst: A Select Guide to Published
Material and Information Sources for the 31st Congress of the
International Psycho-Analytical Association, July 29-August 3,
1979, New York City. Ed. Phyllis Rubinton, Lee Mackler,
Liselotte Bendix Stern, and Katharine B. Wolpe. New York:
[International Universities Press], 1979.

This 22-page pamphlet lists: Libraries and Bibliographic
Reference Services; Libraries in the New York Area;
Psychoanalytic Libraries outside the New York Area;
Sources for Freud and Historic Material; Indexes and
Abstracts; Periodicals (English, French, German,
Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish);
Series [of annual volumes]; Bookstores and Book Deal-

RESEARCH AIDS

ers (New York Area); and Addresses of Publishers. The
list of special collections would be of particular interest
to anyone doing historical research. It was especially
prepared for the 1979 IPA meeting and has,
unfortunately, not been reprinted or updated.

# Schwartz, Murray M., and David Willbern. "Literature and Psy-
chology." Interrelations of Literature. Ed. Jean-Pierre Barricelli
and Joseph Gibaldi. New York: Modern Language Association
of America, 1982. 205-224.
This essay briefly and expertly surveys the field and its
history, concluding with a selective bibliography of dic-
tionaries, bibliographies, theoretical texts, anthologies of
criticism, books and articles in practical criticism, and
periodicals receptive to this approach.

More narrowly focused than English (see next page) and
intended principally for professional use, this dictionary
has long been considered authoritative in the field.
Definitions are expansive, with care taken to trace the
historical evolution or ideological context of terms. All
schools of psychiatry are represented, with the treatment
of psychoanalysis itself quite thorough. This is an

HOLLAND'S GUIDE

update of a 1970 edition by Leland E. Hinsie and Robert
Jean Campbell.

English, Horace Bidwell, and Ava C. English. A Comprehensive
Dictionary of Psychological and Psychoanalytical Terms. New
York: David MacKay, 1958.

Long a standard reference source, this dictionary,
though now dated, is unusually exhaustive in its coverage
of the specialized terminology in the fields of both psy-
chology and psychoanalysis. Definitions are concise,
with plentiful cross references but no bibliographical
references to other sources.

The title is something of a misnomer. This is a collec-
tion of relevant quotations from Freud under alphabeti-
cal headings. It is handy for locating useful statements
from Freud on topics where the alphabetical index to the
Standard Edition would yield an impossibly large num-
ber of references. It is, however, based on the older
translations of Freud, and it is not indexed by page, but
one could use the Freud Concordance to locate quota-
tions found in this work in the Standard Edition.

Focusing exclusively on the concepts of psychoanalysis
proper, this dictionary provides an unusually thorough
treatment of the terms it includes. Emphasis is on
Freud, with explanatory definitions tracing concepts
from their origins in his work. All entries conclude with
citations of relevant passages in Freud or the writings of
his followers. This is an excellent tool for obtaining a
detailed introduction to the basic ideas of psychoanalysis
in its contemporary French version. It lacks, however,
terms useful in psychoanalysis as a whole (such as
"character").

This is a definitive glossary of terms with extensive cross-
referencing and a time-saving list of terms not defined.
The definitions do not refer to other texts, but the book
includes a basic bibliography which would serve as an
introductory reading list. All this, however, comes from
the point of view of American ego-psychology (second-
phase psychoanalysis) and may seem narrow in the
1990s.

Emphasizing but not confined to Freudian psycho-
analysis, this highly readable dictionary provides not only
concise definitions of technical terms but also accounts
of their origins and their connections with other con-

HOLLAND'S GUIDE

cepts in the field. Thorough cross references place indi-
vidual terms in the total framework of psychoanalytic
theory, while references within the entries to the
volume's bibliography point to fuller discussions.
Unfortunately, as of 1989, this excellent work is out of
print.

Published by the American Psychiatric Association as
being "of interest to the general public," this is fairly
elementary. It covers all kinds of psychiatric terms and
its definitions do incorporate the DSM-III. It also gives
tables of abused drugs, drugs used in psychiatry,
neurological deficits, psychological tests, research terms,
and schools of psychiatry. And it contains a biblio-
graphy. This is a revised edition of the American
Psychiatric Association's 1981 psychiatric glossary, the
5th edition, which was more professionally oriented (see
Campbell).

No one of this group of references treats all topics equally well
or, indeed, all topics. All are quite condensed. Researching this
diverse and rapidly changing field, you should consult as many as
possible and especially the most recent available.

This multivolume tool provides a thorough and scholarly
survey of the topics and approaches of contemporary
psychiatry. Intended as a source of condensed but
authoritative information for professionals in the field,
the set focuses its volumes on different areas of the sub-
ject. For example, Vol. 1 concentrates on the historical
foundations of psychiatry, including separate accounts of
all major schools, while Vol. 6 emphasizes new
developments. Each volume has its own subject index to
allow a more precise approach to topics.

This is probably the best overall of the encyclopedias (by
virtue of its size if nothing else). It covers topics
throughout psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry in
considerable depth. The whole fourth volume consists
of bibliography and thorough indexes. It is unusual in
offering sketches of psychology in various nations. The
entry on literature and psychology (by J. Bieri) is quite
good.

The Concise contains some 55% of the 4-volume ver-
sion. Biographies are particularly reduced, but all the
old entries are retained and updated and some new ones
added (notably "Artificial Intelligence" by Herbert A.
Simon).

The two preceding encyclopedias are designed princi-
pally for the nonprofessional reader. They cover the
broad gamut of psychological topics in an abbreviated
but reliable manner. Less technical than other
encyclopedias listed here, they can be useful for provid-
ing introductory treatments of basic concepts and terms.